
Class 



Gopyiight^i^ 

COEffilGHT DEPOSIT. 



WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 
RICHARD ROBERTS. D.D. 



"In divinity and love 
What's best worth saying can't be said." 

— Coventry Patmore. 



WHAT'S BEST 
WORTH SAYING 

A Present Day Discussion 
of Christian Faith and Practice 



RICHARD ROBERTS, D.D. 

[INISTER OF THE AMERICAN PRESBYTERIAN CHURCI 
OF MONTREAL 

Author of "The Untried Door!* etc. 




NEW XBJr YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 






Copyright, 1922, 
By George H. Doran Company 



Printed in the United States of America 

JUL 24?? 

©CI.AfiSl()53 



FOREWORD 

This volume contains a number of addresses de- 
livered for the most part to college students during 
the summer of 1921. 

The addresses are printed much as they were 
spoken, — which circumstance accounts for the de- 
plorable frequency of the first personal pronoun and 
for a certain amount of repetition. If one may recall 
an old-fashioned classification, the first seven ad- 
dresses may be described as "doctrinal," and the 
remainder as "practical." 

The writer would venture to ask that the book 
be taken not as recording final conclusions but as 
reporting the present aspect of a search. 

R. R. 



CONTENTS 

PAGB 

I OF CREEDS II 

II OF FAITH 23 

III OF EVIL 33 

IV OF THE CROSS 45 

V OF JESUS CHRIST 55 

VI OF GOD ABOVE AND GOD WITHIN .... 65 

VII OF GOD AS A SOCIETY 79 

VIII OF SPIRITUAL FREEDOM 87 

IX OF THE BUSINESS OF LIFE IO3 

X OF "love among THE RUINS" . . • . II9 



I 

OF CREEDS 



WHAT'S BEST 
WORTH SAYING 



OF CREEDS 

"In Divinity and Love 
What's best worth saying can't be said." 

— Coventry Patmore. 

MY quarrel with creeds is not that they say too 
much but that they say too Httle. They kave 
unsaid not only "what's best worth saying," but the 
very thing they set out to say. For this thing can- 
not be captured and held in a phrase. It "breaks 
through language and escapes." 

Let me set side by side certain statements which 
at different times have been made concerning Jesus 
Christ : 

He is, says the writer of the Epistle to the He- 
brews, 

"the heir of all things, through whom he (i.e. God) made 
the worlds, being the effulgence of his glory and the ex- 
press image of his person." 



12 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

According to St. Paul, he is 

"the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all 
creation, for in him were all things created, in the heavens 
and upon the earth, things visible and invisible ... all 
things have been created through him and unto him, and 
in him all things consist." 



An old hymn addresses him : 

"O Jesus, King most wonderful 
Thou Conqueror renowned . . ." 



To a later singer, he is the 

"Rock of Ages, cleft for me." 

And to another, still later, 

"Jesus, lover of my soul." 

In the Formula of Chalcedon (A.D. 451), he is 
described as 

">consubstantial with the Father according to his godhead, 
and consubstantial with us according to his manhood . . . 
begotten, both before all worlds, of the Father according 
to his godhead, and also in these latter days, on account 
of us and our salvation, of the Virgin Mary, according to 
his manhood, one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only- 
begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures without 
confusion, change, division, separation, the distinction of 
natures being by no means taken away by the union, but 
rather the property of each being preserved and con- 
curring in one person and one substance, not parted or 
divided into two persons but one and the same Son and 
only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ." 



OF CREEDS IS 

In the Creed commonly called Athanasian (about 
450 A.D.), it is said that 

"though He be God and Man, he is yet not two but one 
Christ ; one however not by the conversion of the divinity 
in the flesh but by assumption of the humanity in God; 
one, altogether, not by confusion of substance but by 
unity of person." 

Now it is difficult for any one to read one after 
another of these declarations without being sensible 
of a distinct fall in temperature on reaching the last 
two. For the first five are in the language of ex- 
perience, in the speech of imagination and poetry; 
and the last two are in the language of the schools, 
the speech of the pure intellect. The earlier state- 
ments are warm, affectionate, even impetuous; the 
latter are formal, deliberate, measured. In the 
former, we take the total impression of the whole, 
without waiting to weigh each separate word; in 
the latter, we feel that the writers intend every word 
to have a precise and fixed content. In the Scrip- 
ture passages especially, one is aware of a certain 
desperate straining of words to cover some fact of 
experience that was beyond the normal resources of 
language. To these writers, the best and the great- 
est things that could be said about Jesus were not 
too good or too great; and had one asked them 
whether they had succeeded in saying all that they 
felt, they would probably have answered that the 



14 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

half had not been told. But the Formula of Chalce- 
don and the Athanasian Creed proceed from clause 
to clause with a deliberate assurance, as though the 
men who wrote them were certain that they had ex- 
plored the whole mystery and were fixing it to all 
eternity in a form of words. Yet it remains true 
that the lines of Toplady and Charles Wesley tell 
us more of what we want to know about Jesus than 
do the great ponderous credal statements. For they 
suggest that warm living reality, the thing "that's 
best worth saying," which has not been captured into 
the creeds. Jesus is greater than anything we can 
say about him, — and the Creeds tell us as much 
about him as a chart of the Solar System tells us 
about the sun or a map of Africa tells us about that 
dark continent. 

A creed is the result of an effort to state a re- 
ligious experience in the language of the intellect, 
under certain categories of thought. The Formula 
of Chalcedon is a deliberate and resolute attempt on 
the part of certain men to state what Jesus Christ 
meant to them in the light of certain ideas chiefly 
derived from Greek philosophy. Let it be said here 
at once (I shall return to the point presently) that 
it was a valuable and necessary thing to make this 
attempt. Yet there are some reasons why the at- 
tempt must always fail, why from the nature of the 
case we can only reach an approximation and why 



OF CREEDS 15 

no creed can be regarded as wholly valid except for 
that point of time at which it was formulated. 

1. The Christian experience is not a static thing. 
It is a living and thei:efore a growing thing. Conse- 
quently a statement made a thousand years ago can 
be only true of the spiritual experience of that time; 
and it can take no account of the soul's discovery of 
new treasures in Christ since that time. In the 
evolution of the Apostles' Creed between i8o and 
400 A.D., we may trace at least ten different ver- 
sions, growing in volume with the passing of time, 
— just as a house is enlarged and added to in order 
to accommodate a growing family. 

2. A second reason lies in the very nature of 
language. A word is a symbol; it represents some 
idea or object of sense. But there is no necessary 
connection between the symbol and the reality. The 
collocation of signs dog has nothing in it that 
necessarily suggests a hairy quadruped that barks. 
The picture of a fish suggested to early Christians 
the name of their Lord, because the initial letters 
of the Greek words "J^sus Christ, Son of God, 
Saviour," put together formed the Greek word 
for fish. There is a similar arbitrariness in the con- 
nection of words with ideas that makes it doubtful 
whether any form of words however precise can 
ever wholly describe a reality of experience. This 
is particularly true when it is a matter of spiritual 



16 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

experience. For human speech is a child of earth; 
it is coloured by its origin and growth in a world of 
matter, time and space. And those elements of a 
religious experience which transcend this world of 
sense we have to describe for the most part nega- 
tively, by saying what they are not. We say, for 
instance, that they are ^w/^^r-natural, or invisible or 
infinite. We have not yet evolved a vocabulary that 
can cover our experience of the unseen. 

3. Moreover, language being itself a living thing 
does not remain static. Words are continually 
changing their meaning. In 161 1 when the King 
James Version was produced, "conversation" did 
not mean a man's talk (as it does to-day) but his 
walk, his conduct. Similarly, the phrase "by and 
by" which means to-day in a little time meant in 
161 1 immediately. These are simple instances; and 
when we come to the language of thought, the 
changes become very important for us. For in- 
stance, it is pretty certain that we nowadays read 
a different content into such words as "substance" 
and "person" from that which the authors of the 
Athanasian Creed and the Formula of Chalcedon 
read into them. If in reading these documents we 
are able to put a meaning to them at all (which is 
not always easy) we cannot be at all sure that it is 
what their authors meant. 

So that we must regard the Creeds not as deft- 



OF CREEDS 17 

nitive statements but as approximations, — ^the best 
that the fathers could make out of the material in 
hand with the tools that were available. But even 
as approximations they are very important and 
valuable. The creed-makers were intending to "fix" 
the Christian experience of the period in order to 
make it secure, to prevent its being lost. The creeds 
have therefore a very definite value for the history 
of religion; they are the landmarks by which we 
trace the advance and the evolution of the Christian 
experience. But for this reason, they have a real 
and a very practical value for us. They mark out 
the road by which those who have gone before us 
have travelled, the road at the end of which we now 
stand. But we cannot stand still. We have to move 
on as they moved on; but we can only be sure that 
we are moving in the right direction if we are true 
to the tradition we have inherited. We stand at the 
end of the road and go ahead; but however far we 
travel, the new road we make must be continuous 
with the road which brought us to our starting- 
point. The creeds are in the proper place when they 
are behind us and not in front of us; but we must 
take care that they really are behind us. We repudi- 
ate nothing of the past; we gather it all up and 
possess it; but we believe like John Robinson of 
Ley den "that God has still more light and truth to 
break forth from his holy Word." 



18 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

This is not to say that we accept the traditional 
creeds word for word as permanent and definitive 
summaries of belief. A good deal that went into 
the creeds found its way there by reason of some 
local or temporary circumstance which has since 
become irrelevant and is now forgotten; and the 
relative emphasis upon the different parts of the 
creeds reflects local and transitory conditions which 
no longer obtain. The continuity of the faith de- 
pends not upon the fixity of its formulae but upon 
the continuity of the life and the experience. The 
forms of belief are of less consequence than the 
living substance of faith; and what we must needs 
be sure of is not some particular formula but 
whether our Christian experience is of a piece with 
that of the authors of the formula. It is the life 
that matters; and if we have the life, the forms will 
take care of themselves. And if we have the life, 
we shall find that the old forms do not altogether 
fit it. A living faith is always growing out of its 
last year's clothes. 

Those good people do religion untold injury who 
demand that we shall give formal and literal assent 
to ancient credal statements. It is in some ways a 
kind of unbelief, a sort of atheism. At least, it 
reflects a supernumerary God, a Deity who has gone 
out of business, a God who has ceased revealing 
himself and who shot his last bolt centuries a^ro. 



OF CREEDS 19 

The injury that this temper does is that it acts as 
an arrest of life. It is a stereotyping of thought 
and therefore puts an embargo upon the adventure 
which a Hving faith always is. It puts a ring-fence 
around life and spiritual experience. It says — 
**Thus far shalt thou go and no further." If life 
remained static in a changeless world, this attitude 
would be intelligible; but life is not static and the 
world is always changing. Life will not long toe 
the lines that we draw for it; still less the life of the 
spirit. 



II 

OF FAITH 



n 

OF FAITH 

IN the previous discussion an attempt was made 
to" show the relation of creeds to the religious life. 
The process of Christian living brings to us certain 
experiences ; and the creeds are intellectual formula- 
tions of these experiences. Properly understood 
therefore they register the stages in the develop- 
ment of the Christian experience. 

Experience is the name that we give to all that 
happens to us, all that comes to us in the business of 
living. We live together in the world; we act and 
react upon one another and upon the world ; we see, 
hear, feel, suffer, discover, understand a great many 
things; we are surprised, disappointed, pleased, 
shocked; and the sum total of all these varied im- 
pressions is what we call "experience." 

Experience is the raw material of truth. We 
ponder over it, sort out, analyse, classify its in- 
gredients, reach certain conclusions ; and then we try 
to express these conclusions in a form of words. 
So we get a hypothesis or a theory, which we pro- 
ceed to verify by experiment; and if the hypothesis 
23 



24 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

or the theory stands the test, we may call it a law, 
a general principle, a doctrine, — ^but by whatever 
name we call it we esteem it a portion of truth. 

But the kind of experience we acquire depends 
largely upon the point from which we set out, upon 
the kind of preliminary acceptance with which we 
start. For instance, if we set out assuming that 
all men are beasts we shall gather a different kind 
of experience from that which we should gather if 
we assumed that all men are brothers. The Chris- 
tian experience is the particular kind of experience 
we acquire when we live the Christian life, — when 
we live the life of faith, (faith, that is, in the 
Christian sense). 

Now faith has been latterly at something of a 
discount. Over against the triumphs of the scien- 
tific method, it did not seem to amount to very 
much. The achievements of science have been so 
great and so startling that we were more than half 
convinced when it was affirmed that our senses and 
our reasoning faculties were the only and the ade- 
quate organs for the ascertainment of truth. So we 
had a period of what was called Rationalism ; even 
the man in the street became infected with it and 
counted faith a superstition and an anachronism. 

But it was overlooked that faith enters inevitably 
and all the time into the very fabric of life. We 
are living in a world of time, moving out of the 



OF FAITH 25 

known into the unknown; every step we take is a 
step in the dark. And faith is the power by which 
we are enabled to take the step. Even so simple an 
aifair as packing one's baggage to-night for a jour- 
ney to be taken to-morrow is an act of faith, resting 
upon a number of strictly undemonstrable assump- 
tions; and if one were rigorously and consistently 
rationalist, the packing would have to be delayed 
until we had reached the journey's end. Without 
faith, life must remain static, ineffectual. Even 
science, as William James said, cannot do business 
without faith; for every experiment we make is an 
act of faith. We trust a theory or a hypothesis so 
far as to act upon it; and that, as we shall see in a 
moment, is the very substance of faith. 

It may however be urged that this natural and 
instinctive faith is not the same thing as a religious 
faith; yet it is the same faith, with a difference. 
There are two words which we use as synonymous 
with faith, — namely, belief and trust; and in a re- 
ligious faith, both belief and trust are always 
present Belief is the assent of the mind to a propo- 
sition which is not demonstrable by the ordinary 
processes of proof. That however does not distin- 
guish it from opinion. An opinion is a static thing 
that lies on the brain without affecting one's life; 
a man may have a cartload of opinions without their 
making any difference to his conduct. But a belief 



26 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

is a dynamic thing; to quote William James once 
more, a belief always discharges itself in an act. 
Take for instance the proposition "that God exists." 
Most people give an assent to this proposition; but 
it is often nothing more than an opinion, for it 
makes no diiference to many of the people who 
hold it. They still go on living as though there were 
no God. But the moment the opinion becomes a 
belief, then it makes a world of difference. 

Yet not always the same difference. For the 
kind of difference depends upon what we think 
about God. "The devils believe," says the Apostle 
James; and the belief discharges itself in an act. 
"The devils believe and tremble/' They suppose 
God to be unfriendly to them, and their belief dis- 
charges itself in active fear. But if we think that 
God is friendly, then our belief will discharge itself 
in an equally active trust. Back of faith, then, is 
the assumption of a friendly God; and even the 
instinctive faith by which we pass from day to day 
has behind it the assumption of a friendly universe. 
Our packing for to-morrow's journey rests upon 
the assumption that the universe is so far friendly 
that it will co-operate with us in providing the con- 
ditions necessary to the journey. 

Faith, then, we may define in general terms as the 
will to live on the assumption that God is friendly 
to us, that God is love; and here you find the con- 



OF FAITH 27 

tinuous thread which runs through the Christian 
experience and the Christian testimony of all ages. 
Through this will to live on the assumption that 
God is love we acquire the distinctive Christian ex- 
perience and gather those materials out of which 
thought evolves its formulations — both great and 
small, both collective and personal — of Christian 
truth. This is the one ** fundamental," this will to 
love on the assumption that God is love. 

Please observe the two words, "will" and *'assump- 
tion." I use the word ^'assumption" because the 
proposition that *'God is love" cannot be proved 
beforehand. It can only be proved by being tried 
out. It must begin as an assumption, a hypothesis. 
I use the word will because the assumption must be 
deliberately chosen; one is not compelled to choose 
it. There are possible alternatives. We may will 
to live on the assumption that there is no God; or 
that God does not care ; or that God is a malevolent 
being; or that God is an infinite Cynic, a celestial 
Irony. Men have lived on these assumptions; and 
some sort of case may be made out for each one of 
them. A plausible case may be built up against the 
belief that God is love. Beforehand, there is no 
overwhelming constraint that ties us up to the as- 
sumption that God is love. 

Life as we know it is a strange medley of good 
and evil, a mingling of light and shade. Take a 



28 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

cross-section of life at any moment and it would 
be difficult to say whether at that moment the ele- 
ments of good or the elements of evil are more 
evident or active. Life as a whole provides no 
unchallengable ground for any single philosophy, 
whether of hope or despair, of faith or unbelief. 
Of course, if one selects one's facts, one may find 
materials for any kind of philosophy. Shut your 
eyes to the sinister and untoward facts of life and 
you may build out of them as blithe an optimism 
as you will ; similarly a blind eye turned to the love 
and good and joy that pour sunlight upon life will 
enable you to develop a pessimism of utter and im- 
relieved blackness. But it is not possible for an 
honest mind to look out upon life as it is and declare 
that it tells a single unqualified tale or speaks with 
undivided voice. There is no general proposition 
that you can lay down about life which is not open 
to reasonable doubt. 

What we have to do then is to look out upon the 
facts as a whole; and then to lay out side by side 
those alternative propositions that are supported by 
a sufficient body of fact to make them at least 
arguable. Then out of these we have to choose that 
proposition which seems to be on the whole truest 
and most reasonable. We are speaking now not of 
scientific or strictly philosophical propositions, but 



OF FAITH 29 

of propositions of a religious kind, — whether there 
be a God and what manner of God he is. 

When a ship is out of sight of land, it determines 
its course by the sun. The navigating officer takes 
his sextant at midday and determines the latitude 
and longitude of the position of the ship. But on a 
cloudy day he has to proceed differently. He ascer- 
tains from the "patent log" what distance the ship 
has travelled in the previous twenty- four hours; he 
takes a mean of the course steered by the compass; 
he makes certain allowances for wind and weather, 
for tides and currents; and at last he arrives at a 
result, — a hypothetical point at which to the best of 
his belief the ship is at that time. And he says — 
"For the next twenty- four hours we shall go on the 
assumption that at midday to-day we are at this 
point we have marked on the chart." This is de- 
scribed as going by "dead reckoning." 

And on the ocean of life we have to go by "dead 
reckoning." We have no sure knowledge of the 
port whence we started or of the harbour for which 
we are bound. Our sky of knowledge is clouded. 
So we have to take account of all the facts at our 
disposal; and out of these to work out some basis 
for life, some assumption on which to proceed. We 
are liable to error and to miscalculation; but we do 
our best. We reach our basis and we say — "This 
to the best of my knowledge is the truest most rea- 



so WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

sonable, most promising proposition concerning life 
and the God of life. I accept it for myself and 
from now on face my own life in the world on the 
assumption that this proposition is truth." That is 
the act of Faith. 

Now the Christian assumption is that the God of 
Life is a God of Love. Faith in a Christian sense 
is the will to face life on the assumption that God 
is love; and it is the Christian claim that no man 
exercises this faith sincerely without finding that it 
works. The man who lives on the assumption that 
God is love discovers that the assumption is a fact. 

But meantime before he adopts this assumption 
as his own, we have to convince him that it is the 
most reasonable view to take, the view that is most 
likely to turn out to be true. For we are asking him 
to do a very great thing. We are asking him to 
stake his whole life upon the assumption. 



Ill 

OF EVIL 



Ill 

OF EVIL 

THE difficulty of believing that God is love 
arises from the existence of evil in the world. 
If God is love, why does he allow sin and suffering? 
How are we to account for the brokenness of life? 
How comes it to pass that such a calamity as the 
European War should overtake the world? Why 
do little children die? And why a thousand other 
cruel anomalies? 

It is perhaps pertinent to observe that this problem 
has always been present in the world ; and yet in 
spite of it, what I have called natural faith has sur- 
vived. We still — ^after some millennia of experi- 
ence — face life on the assumption that the universe, 
on the whole and at last is friendly to us. We may 
even say that this is the normal instinctive attitude 
to life. There are exceptions, it is true; but this is 
the common attitude of the ordinary man; and it 
survives in him because it has been justified by the 
experience of the ages. Our forefathers found that 
this was on the whole a friendly universe; and it 
is a simple biological truth that our natural endow- 
33 



S4> WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

ment of instinctive faith is our inheritance from 
this long ancestral experience. 

Yet every age has its doubts and questionings; 
and it has to face this old problem for itself. 



In the economy of the Universe two broad facts 
must be observed. 

The first is human freedom. A strong theoretical 
case can of course be made for determinism; but 
I have never yet known a determinist who did not 
assume that he himself was free and acted accord- 
ingly. Here freedom means simply the capacity 
and power to make choices, and we habitually as- 
sume that we have that power. We are free ap- 
parently because we are meant to be persons and not 
pawns — "helpless pieces of the game He plays." 
Freedom implies independence, individuality — it 
makes possible grace and nobility of conduct, and, at 
its highest, a certain impulse toward creation. But 
obviously freedom to create is also freedom to de- 
stroy, the freedom to be a saint is also the freedom 
to be a pig. God (if the figure be allowed) in 
leaving man free was taking a great risk, but he was 
playing for a great stake. It may be true that our 
endowment of freedom is very limited — and indeed 
it is limited by our own acts continually no less than 
by the entail of the acts of our forebears — but for 



OF EVIL S5 

all that, it is evidently a great deal more than most 
of us know how to use wisely. 

The second fact is a certain principle of contin- 
uity. To this there are two aspects. One is our 
human solidarity. Each one of us is a ganglion in a 
nervous system which is as enduring as time, and 
as wide as the world. To-day this is more intensely 
so than it has ever been; the world is a precinct; 
and the ends of the earth are at the end of the street. 
An influenza microbe of a new type is bred in the 
filth of a central Asian village and it kills its hun- 
dreds of thousands in America. A murder in an 
outlandish little town in Europe plunges the whole 
world into a murderous war. 

The second aspect of this continuity is what we 
may for lack of a better name call moral causality — 
the process by which a man comes to reap what he 
sows, which links the sowing of sin to the harvest of 
tragedy. 

But neither aspect of this principle of continuity 
has an inherent moral colour. Both are ethically 
colourless. Their moral results depend upon the 
material that is put into them; and it must be in- 
sisted that they make for the succession and the 
increase of good as readily as they do for evil. The 
principle that provides that the sins of the fathers 
shall be visited upon their children to the third and 
fourth generations also provides equally that the 



36 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

good deeds of the father shall descend on the same 
terms in blessing on their children's heads. Human 
solidarity distributes blessing as it distributes trag- 
edy. What we have here is (as it were) a piece of 
machinery. If you choose to put in it shoddy raw 
material you will get shoddy products. If you will 
put into it sound raw material, you will get sound 
products. And if the machine turns out pain and 
sorrow, the inference is surely plain. It turns out 
what in the exercise of our freedom we have chosen 
to put into it. 

So far as man in the mass is concerned, it is pos- 
sible out of these circumstances to weave a doctrine 
of providence which is satisfying enough. I should 
say that all this means that God has laid upon man 
the problem of his own salvation and that he has 
put him in this setting in order that he might learn 
wisdom and truth through his own experience. 
These principles of freedom, solidarity, causality 
are organs of race-education, and the way in which 
men's actions work out under these conditions 
should at least teach men the difference between 
right and wrong and enable them to choose good 
rather than evil. It is evidently ordained that we 
shall learn through our burned fingers and broken 
hearts the things that belong to our peace. And 
though we have had lessons sharp enough, we are 
woefully slow to understand. 



OF EVIL «7 



II 



This hypothesis, however, does not cover the case 
of the individual. Why should the cost of the 
education of the race fall so heavily upon the indi- 
vidual ? Here I admit at once that I have no satis- 
fying answer to give. I do not know why the 
individual should be sacrificed for the education of 
the race, for the race has no meaning apart from 
the individuals that constitute it. I cannot even 
guess why the babies of Europe should have to pay 
the price of the crimes and follies of a godless im- 
perialism, a dishonest diplomacy, and a stupid state- 
craft. 

All the same, I am not, because there is a gap in 
my thought at this point, going to throw away the 
rest. I profess a frank agnosticism on this point, 
and am prepared to wait for more data than I have 
at the moment before I reach a final conclusion. 
Meantime, however, I note one or two circumstances 
that mitigate the harshness of the dilemma. 

First, there is at least a partial law of compensa- 
tion in life. The person who is deprived of sight 
develops a peculiar sensitiveness of touch. I re- 
member years ago reading two medical books on in- 
fant mortality, and in both of them the same sen- 
tence occurred verbatim: Nature is always on the 
side of the infant. Nature provides a real prospect 



38 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

even for the ill-born child, if it gets reasonable care 
after birth. It is out of the observation of certain 
facts of this kind that we got the saying that with 
the bane nature provides the antidote. Neverthe- 
less, we cannot pretend, in the present state of our 
knowledge, that this principle of compensation is 
universal. 

Second, there is a provision by which material 
and, physical evil may become the means of spiritual 
advantage. Many a man has achieved a peculiar 
grace of life as the result of a physical handicap; 
and there have been plenty of cases where personal 
tragedy has become the cornerstone of high 
achievement. But here again we must admit that 
the compensation is apparently neither complete nor 
universal. 

Yet concerning these matters, it is not unfair to 
suggest that compensation for human ills might be 
a good deal more extensive were it not for man's 
inhumanity to man. 

Third, there is the possibility of immortality. I 
say possibility not because I think it only a pos- 
sibility, but simply because I am trying to keep 
within the limits of the present argument. I think 
that there are better grounds for believing in im- 
mortality than for disbelieving in it. It is no ob- 
jection to immortality that Mr. Wells says that the 



OF EVIL 89 

craving for it is a form of egoism. That is equally 
an objection to the craving for freedom. And I 
believe that at bottom the craving for immortality 
is a craving for perfect freedom. In any case, at 
the lowest, it is a fair presumption from the facts 
of life as we know them that the human soul does 
not derive its life or its peculiar quality from per- 
ishable matter, and that the dissolution of the body 
is not necessarily the extinction of the soul. And I 
am the freer to affirm this for myself insomuch as 
the hope of immortality has not played a very great 
part in my own personal life. 

So that I think that there are possibilities of a 
very considerable kind which go far to modify the 
harshness of the case of the individual. But there 
is another fact to be remembered in this connection. 
Quite apart from immortality, have we all the data 
at hand for a final view of this matter, and are the 
data that we have set out in a sound proportion? 
Tragedy is always spectacular, dramatic: it catches 
the eye, and while it is upon us, it fills the stage. 
Consequently it may receive a disproportionate place 
in our view of things. Peace is quiet, uneventful, 
undramatic; it calls no attention to itself. I would 
not minimize the tragedy of war, especially as we 
seem on the verge of the added tragedy of forget- 
ting the unspeakable sorrow of it. But vast as the 



40 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

destruction and sorrow were that it wrought, we 
may not forget its strange beautiful heroisms, and 
its brave endurances, and all that this means of hope 
and reassurance for the race. And for all the years 
before it and in the many years to come, despite 
social injustices without number, men have gone 
on and will go on enjoying the peace of horne, the 
joy of loving and being loved, the satisfactions of 
work well done — in the mass, an immeasurable 
volume of well-being, of which in the long tale of 
the years the war will count for no more than a 
passing interruption. The unseen love, the im- 
reported joy, the peace that passeth the notice of the 
newspaper, the daily and hourly satisfactions of 
friendship and good work, these things that fill the 
common unheeded ways of life and which blossom 
through and after sorrow and calamity — just as 
fields of France which two years ago were bleak and 
bare save for the signs of death and destruction were 
last year covered with green and grain — all this we 
must include in our accounting. 

Now, let it be admitted at once that so far this 
argument does little more than warn us of the dan- 
ger of hastily dismissing the hypothesis of a friendly 
God. The fact of evil remains ; and there are dark 
tracts of life of which we can find no satisfactory 
explanation that is consistent with a belief in a God 
of love. Concerning this we may as well be quite 



OF EVIL 41 

frank; for there is no profit in self-deception or in 
accepting a hypothesis which is larger than the facts 
can carry. But we are not yet at the end of our 
argtunent. 



OF THE CROSS 



IV 

OF THE CROSS 

HENRY ADAMS and Bertrand Russell have 
both been impressed by the apparent in- 
evitability of the final extinction of life on this planet. 
Each has, obeying his own temperamental push, 
drawn his own moral from this circumstance. And 
most healthy human beings will say that, if the 
premises and the conclusions of the argument be 
sound, then Bertrand Russell shows the way. Let us 
keep up the fight to the end. Even though it be a 
losing fight, it is the only life for a free spirit. But 
we have after all only a speculation here, and one 
enormous assumption on which it rests is that life 
is indissolubly bound up with matter and physical 
energy. Life in the forms that we know is of course 
so bound up. But it is a very different matter to 
assume that life can only exist in the forms that 
we know. For, as a matter of fact, we simply do 
not know what life is. We know a good deal about 
it, true. We have built up elaborate and extensive 
sciences dealing with its manifestations, but what 
it is that all this knowledge is about, no one can 
45 



46 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

tell. So that it is a very large assumption indeed 
that life must perish because some day this planet 
will become uninhabitably cold. 

It is not necessary to accept the Bergsonian doc- 
trine as a whole in order to subscribe to this hypoth- 
esis of the elan vital. What seems to be tolerably 
evident is that life as a whole is a process, a move- 
ment, and that it is a process which tends to the 
production of more complex and sensitive forms. 
Whether this is by adaptation to an intractable 
environment, as Darwin might say, or by the sub- 
jection of matter to its own designs, as Bergson 
might say, is immaterial. Life seems to be on the 
move; it appears to have a general direction, which 
may mean and presumably does mean that it has 
a goal, though the goal is not in sight. 

But can we form any idea as to what life is 
getting at? What does it mean? On the face of it, 
it is admittedly full of contradictions and its worst 
enemies are they of its own household. The tuber- 
culosis bacillus is as much a manifestation of life 
as the man it kills. Everywhere life seems to be at 
odds with itself. Its movement is an excessively 
costly affair, and its wake is strewn with casualties. 
It appears to be heedless of the cost of its cam- 
paign, and yet it is solicitous for its own preserva- 
tion. It has its own Red Cross organisation; and 
what are our modern sciences of surgery and medi- 



OF THE CROSS 47 

cine, especially preventive medicine, but life's own 
sanitary train, life itself organised for its own heal- 
ing and survival? This persistent paradox of life, 
its tenderness and its ruthlessness, its mercifulness 
and its mercilessness, its creativeness and its destruc- 
tiveness — does it not seem to be a large exercise in 
irony on the part of the "President of the Immor- 
tals" or perhaps the blind confusion of an unintel- 
ligent Immanent Will? 

If the civil war within life itself showed signs 
of ending in a drawn battle, or at least to be 
of such fluctuating fortune that it must soon or late 
end in exhaustion, then we might have to settle 
down to the rather grim fact that the whole affair 
is a damnable swindle and make the best of it. But 
the fact seems to be that the battle is not an inde- 
cisive one, that always the creative forces are gain- 
ing ground, here a little, there a little. Life has 
climbed up from the slime to a point at which it 
shaped something that conceived and built the 
Temple of Nike Apteros, that composed the Iliad 
and the Divina Commedia and Hamlet. 

Now while it is beyond human wit to divine the 
final end to which life is moving, it is a tolerably 
safe proceeding to infer the direction in which life 
is moving from what the human spirit at its best 
recognises as the high-water marks of life in history. 
There are certain achievements in art, literature, 



48 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

music, and more generally in the realisation of life 
which we instinctively feel and universally acknowl- 
edge to be sublime; and if I were to be asked what 
among all these achievements seems to me to be the 
highest point that life has yet reached I should say 
at once and without hesitation that it is the per- 
sonality of Jesus of Nazareth. 

It matters nothing to my present point in what 
fashion we theologise about Jesus. Let us think 
of him primarily as a manifestation of life; but 
he seems also to have had power to quicken his 
own quality of life in all whom he touched and who 
were not unwilling to receive it. As I read his story, 
what strikes me most is that we see in him an em- 
bodiment of the forces that make for life; and the 
more clearly so inasmuch as he was all his life sur- 
rounded and beset by the forces that make for 
death. As time went on, this opposition grew until 
it came to a climax upon Calvary. In that moment 
the whole inner contradiction of life was focused 
down to one single terrific impact. The issue was 
never sharper or clearer. The forces that make for 
death — hatred, contempt, hardened institutionalism, 
professionalism, the mob-spirit, hysteria, violence — 
did their worst and their deadliest. And at the end 
of the day, what ? 

True, there was a dead body. So far the forces 
of death had triumphed. But it was a victory that 



OF THE CROSS 49 

came too late. For the fight was over before the 
moment of death. Nay, in the very act and article 
of death, life had triumphed. 

For there was revealed upon the cross a spirit 
which the forces of death could not break. "Father, 
forgive them, for they know not what they do.'* 
There is the victory of life. This is life at its 
supremest — in the triumph of love over hate. The 
forces of death destroyed the body, the organ of 
life in a material world, but here was something 
that it could not destroy — a love that was true to 
itself through everything, that never capitulated 
before the onset of hate, denial, derision, contempt, 
and ignorance, and carried its banner to the end of 
the day. 

When in ages to come men speak of the Great 
War, they will single out one word as the noblest 
and finest utterance of that dark time — the word of 
a woman. Edith Cavell's last word — purging her 
spirit of hate and bitterness when hate and bitterness 
might have been so easy, so intelligible — belongs to 
the same category as the Word from the Cross. 
Once more in its extremity, life utters itself in love. 
Read the poets of the Polish Captivity — Sygmunt 
Krasinski especially — and you will see again the 
same thing — life in extremis uttering itself in words 
of mercy and forgiveness. And there stands Abra- 
ham Lincoln — as the essential man shapes himself 



^0 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

across the years ; and what our eyes see and approve 
is the magnanimity, the passion to heal wounds, the 
forgivingness which flowered in him in those dark 
years of the Civil War, — once more life revealing 
jts heart of love. 

Here, then, I find a way. The fact that strikes 
me and holds me is that life is struggling upward 
to perfect love. It has a long way to go; it has 
many battles to fight on the road, and it is handi- 
x:apped in a thousand ways — ^but that is the direction 
in which it is trying to go. And the God whom I 
discern dimly behind all this is a God who is him- 
self involved in this struggle — somehow, I cannot 
tell how. Immanence is a name we give to a mys- 
tery. But the God I see is so — a. struggling God, 
not a God static in his perfection, 

"On heights too high for our aspiring. 
Coldly sublime, intolerably just." 

'This is a living God, a moving God, a God still 
.creating, still redeeming, and in creation and re- 
demption fulfilling himself. All this of course is 
; shocking to the philosophical purist, as shocking 
as his Absolute is to me. I admit, moreover, that 
the conception leaves many questions unanswered, 
and does not explain the contradictions of life. But 
I seem now to see God engaged in overcoming the 
.contradictions, and in "gathering all things together 



OF THE CROSS 51 

in one." I infer my God not from what life seems 
now to be, but from what it appears to me to be 
struggling to reach — perfect love. 

So I find my working hypothesis. I am going to 
face Hfe on the assumption that God is — in the 
face of all appearances — on our side. I have not 
disposed of the notes of interrogation; and as it 
promises to be a long business to find answers to 
all of them, and as meantime I have a life to live, 
I have to take my **dead reckoning" and go ahead. 
So I take my stand (for what it is worth) on the 
side of this God. I enlist with him in the great 
struggle I see Him engaged in, and very simply 
send out a hailing thought to tell him so. And it 
seems to me (perhaps it is but a fancy) that in due 
time there comes an answering signal. And if it 
be but a fancy, well then, it is a very precious fancy, 
for it brings with it a strange reassurance and peace. 

I should add that I have not tried here to say 
everything that the Cross means to me. To that I 
shall come at a later point. What I have endeav- 
oured here is to show how the Cross helps me to 
reach my **dead reckoning" and my will to live on 
the assumption that God is love. 



V 
OF JESUS CHRIST 



OF JESUS CHRIST 

IN the previous discussion I ventured to express 
the judgement that — whatever else may be true 
concerning Him — ^Jesus represents the high-water 
mark of the achievement of Life in the world. Upon 
this judgement, I laid a great weight of argument; 
and it is necessary therefore that I should make some 
effort to justify it, or at least to show that it is not 
a merely private opinion. 

The quotations at the beginning of the first chap- 
ter are not isolated or scattered judgements con- 
cerning Jesus; they are typical and characteristic. 
Whenever men or groups of men have looked under- 
standingly upon Jesus, they invariably place him in 
a very unique position. They assign Him to a class 
by himself; and generally this class is the highest 
which they are able to conceive. To Dante, for 
instance, He is the Triumphant and Glorified Re- 
deemer, enthroned in Paradise, the heart of the 
white rose of the redeemed. To Shelley, He is the 
Supreme Poet and the Supreme Reformer; to 
William Blake, the *'human form divine,'* the 
55 



56 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

creative centre of a creative human society. Brown- 
ing finds in him the solution of the problems of 
thought : 

"I say the acknowledgment of God in Christ, 
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee, 
All questions in the earth and out of it." 

To Tennyson, He is the 

"Strong Son of God, Immortal Love." 

who has revealed the ultimate truth of manhood 
and brought life and incorruption to light through 
the Gospel. Francis Thompson sees him as the 
ever-present Lord of all things, revealing Himself 
in sunrise and sunset, and 

"walking on the waters 
Not of Gennesaret, but Thames." 

Mazzini discovers in Him the Representative Man, 
the centre of the true universal humanity; Savona- 
rola proclaimed Him "King of Florence;" and 
Ruskin taught us to think of Him as the Living 
Master who sets us all to work and sustains us while 
we are at it.* 

Observe the variety of character and office which 
is here ascribed to Jesus ; observe also the unanimity 
with which these writers assign to him a sort of 

* In this paragraph I am summarising conclusions the evi- 
dence for which is given in detail in my book "That One 
Face," pubhshed by the Association Press. 



OF JESUS CHRIST 57 

sovereignty in their own fields of interest. How 
comes it to pass that all these characters sit so easily 
upon a single person ? That his shoulders are found 
broad enough to carry them all? And it is a para- 
dox that requires much thinking about that all this 
is said of a peasant who lived nineteen centuries ago 
in an obscure corner of the earth. No other his- 
torical figure has ever received such universality and 
unanimity of respect and honour. Nor is it merely 
the thinker, the prophet, the leader of men who has 
spoken of him in such terms as these or felt in this 
way about him. There is a story told by William 
Hazlitt of a gathering at which he and others of 
his set discussed the names of persons they would 
like to have met ; and every great name in literature, 
history and art, came up for review. Charles Lamb 
said the last word : "There is only one Person I can 
ever think of after this. ... If Shakespeare were 
to come into this room, we should all rise up to meet 
him; but if that Person was to come into it, we 
should all fall and try to touch the hem of his gar- 
ment." And something of that sort common folk in 
many lands and in many ages have felt about Him. 
Just why they have felt like this about him, I 
am not now proposing to discuss; I am concerned 
with the fact rather than with the explanation of it. 
But in passing I would interpolate this; that there 
is no way of finding out why men have so felt about 



58 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

Jesus except that of first mastering the Gospels, and 
particularly the first three Gospels. Our knowledge 
of the Gospels is so fragmentary that we only know 
Jesus in shreds and patches. Few of us have a 
mental impression of him as an entire personality; 
and I know of no way of acquiring this impression 
save that of soaking ourselves in the Gospel story, 
of reading Matthew, Mark and Luke again and 
again and again until we acquire not only a sense of 
the artistic unity of the story they tell, but a sense 
of Jesus as a whole distinct and rounded person. 
That to begin with; but there is a good deal more 
that will follow from it. 

Meantime I wish to insist upon this very remark- 
able unanimity with which, as Mr. Bernard Shaw 
says, "the imagination of white mankind has picked 
out Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ." This process 
of identifying Jesus with the "Christ" or whatever 
was supposed to represent the highest category of 
religious feeling or of thought began very early in- 
deed. The critics are not agreed whether Jesus 
himself claimed to be the Messiah; but they are all 
agreed that the generation next His own claimed 
that he was the Christ, the Anointed of God. In 
those strange mystery-religions which invaded the 
Graeco-Roman world from the East, the central 
figure was the kurios or the lord, as for instance, 
"our Lord Serapis." But when Jesus came on the 



OF JESUS CHRIST 59 

scene, this title kurios, Lord, was transferred to 
Him. And when he invaded the region of Greek 
thought a remarkable thing happened. 

Greek philosophy is the record of the most mag- 
nificent pioneering adventure in history, the sys- 
tematic search for truth, for the clue to reality and 
life. For centuries men had breathed the atmos- 
phere of enquiry; and this splendid quest was 
handed down from one generation to another, — a 
priceless inheritance. But beyond the facts of life, 
they knew no road but that of speculation ; and along 
this road Plato reached his doctrine of the Idea, 
and the Stoics in their day that of the Word, the 
Logos, — the emanation of God in his universe. But 
it was no more than great guess-work. The Idea, the 
Logos was away up in the clouds where no man 
could see it ; it never came down to earth. Yet these 
men longed to discover this first and last thing, this 
Idea or Word, as eagerly as the Jews longed for 
their Messiah. And then when some of them heard 
of Jesus from men who had known him, when they 
came to study the record of his life, they stood up 
and said, "At last, here it is! Here is the Logos, 
long sought and long desired.** And with minds 
aflame, they leaped to the tremendous affirmation 
which is recorded in the Fourth Gospel : 'The Logos 
became flesh and dwelt among us." And all the 
Creeds are but an elaboration of this theme. 



60 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

Now, it is a fair inference that a person who can 
be assigned to all these categories must belong to 
some category which includes them all, — a category 
presumably on that account super-human. So men 
have come to worship Jesus as God. And what was 
involved in calling Jesus the Logos was that here in 
this world. He is the perfect and adequate revelation 
of God. For these old Greeks, he had — as we say 
nowadays — the value of God. He was God writ 
small, God expressed *'in littleness that suits our 
faculty." 

Man is bom with a sense of God; but this sense of 
God is something very vague and indefinite, a sense 
of Something There, ultimate and supreme. It is 
a sort of blank canvas, and mankind has been 
busier at nothing than it has at the task of filling this 
blank canvas with some intelligible content. First, 
it filled it with trees and animals, or some repre- 
sentation of living things. That 'was the stage of 
animism. Then it tried to fill it with the human 
form; and finding no human form that could fill 
the canvas, it filled it with a number of man-like 
figures; that was the stage of polytheism. Then 
came a time when men sought to discover the mys- 
tery of deity by turning inward, by reflection and 
speculation; and they filled the canvas with abstract 
ideas. The result of this was to make God intangi- 
ble, out of reach. The human attempt to picture 



OF JESUS CHRIST 61 

God has made him either too far above or too far 
below men for the purpose of warm and intelligent 
communion. 

But God has never left himself without witness; 
and as the writer of Hebrews says, having at sundry 
times and in divers manners spoken in times past 
to the fathers by the prophets, He at last spoke in 
a Son. And when men looked upon Jesus, they 
found the blank canvas filled at last. "The light of 
the knowledge of the glory of God," said St. Paul, 
"shines upon us in the face of Jesus Christ." And 
this is the point of the word which the Fourth 
Gospel puts on the lips of Jesus : "He that hath seen 
me, hath seen the Father." 

Now, this is the experience which lies behind our 
ascription of Deity to Jesus. It is that he satisfies 
our feeling for God. But it is as well to remember 
that what we believe about Jesus is not a phrase we 
borrow from a creed but the personal attitude we 
take up toward Him. For it is possible to accept 
everything the Creeds say about Him and yet in 
practice deny Him. For the Creeds have had a 
tendency to remove Jesus from life. They have 
generalised Him into an idea, substituting a meta- 
physical abstraction for a warm living person. 
The Creeds meant to deify Jesus; but their effect 
has often been to dehumanise Him. They interred 
Him in a formula ; and there are few of us who have 



62 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

not sometimes found that formula standing between 
Him and ourselves. And often men in their zeal for 
the Christ of the Creeds have denied the Jesus of the 
Gospels. They have been intolerant, severe, even 
cruel in their devotion to an abstract truth; they 
persecuted, hanged and burned those who could not 
accept their definitions. Yet all the time they were 
meaning to be loyal to Jesus. "Their faith unfaith- 
ful kept them falsely true." It is not what we say 
about Him that expresses what we believe about 
Him. It is what we do when we see Him, and the 
kind of people we are in consequence. 



VI 

OF GOD ABOVE AND GOD WITHIN 



VI 

OF GOD ABOVE AND GOD WITHIN 



"Think you (asks Wordsworth) 

amid this mighty sum 

Of things for ever speaking 

That nothing of itself will come 

But we must still be seeking?" 

THE only answer we can return to the poet's 
question is that from the nature of the case we 
cannot help seeking. We do not always find what 
we seek; but being what we are in such a world as 
this, we cannot escape hunger and thirst and we are 
driven to seek. Even that "wise passiveness" which 
the poet commends in the same poem is itself a sort 
of seeking, — 3. waiting, an expectation for some boon 
of light that the mind cannot or does not define. We 
are born, seekers ; so we live, so we die, seeking to the 
end. The whole story of our race is the story of 
a search. History is no more than the tale of man 
in quest of himself, seeking truth, peace, fulfilment, 
the city which hath the foundations, and God. 

Yet it is the paradox of this search that never 
directly does it find its object. It discovers not what 
it sought but something else. What is given is not 



66 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

what was asked for. St. Paul tells us how he prayed 
that the thorn in his flesh might be taken away ; and 
how his prayer was denied. Yet he did not go 
unanswered, — *'My grace," said the Voice, "is suffi- 
cient for thee." And this, as he came to see, was 
more to the point than his request; for the healing 
of our hurt is a lesser gift than the strengthening 
of our life. This same man tells us how all his life 
he had sought righteousness and self -fulfilment in 
the faithful observance of the law; and he reports 
that he was "as touching the righteousness which is 
in the law, found blameless." But it left him empty 
and distracted. Yet this sincerity and passion of 
moral effort had prepared him for a great light; 
and one day the light came. He found immeas- 
urably more than he had sought. He had looked 
for goodly pearls; and his reward was the pearl of 
great price; and it is this experience which he gen- 
eralised in the notable saying: "The Law was our 
Schoolmaster to lead us to Christ." 

And when we pass from the plane of a purely 
personal experience to the broader experience of 
the race, the same paradox pursues us. The su- 
preme instance of it has been cast by George Mac- 
donald into four inimitable lines : 

"They all were looking for a king 
To slay their foes and lift them high; 
Thou cam'st a little baby thing , 

That made a woman cry." 



OF GOD ABOVE AND GOD WITHIN 67 

We seek and we find, but not what we were looking 
for; we ask and what is given to us is not that for 
which we asked. We knock, and another door is 
opened to us. And yet, always — though for a time 
we may not see it, — what is given is better than what 
was sought. The door which is opened to us brings 
us to a fairer mansion than the door at which we 
were knocking. 

II 

In all this, there is (I think) much more thsm 
meets the eye. It holds the germs of a philosophy. 
In the experiences of which we speak, there are 
plainly two factors — Ourselves and Something 
which the necessity of language compels us to de- 
scribe as being outside ourselves. There is always 
I and Something not I, Something other than my- 
self. Paul prays for healing; the Other sends him 
strength; he seeks righteousness and the Other 
shows him Christ. And from these instances and 
others like them we may perhaps rise to the general 
statement that there are two co-ordinate movements 
in life, — a seeking, a quest, a search, on the one 
hand; and on the other, a showing, a bestowal, an 
apocalypse. 

When in the early days of Christianity, the 
disciples were being harassed and persecuted by the 
Roman Empire, their minds dwelt longingly upon 
the thought of that promised city of God which 



68 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

should supersede the pride of Imperial Rome. (For 
remember that the Apocalypse was not merely a 
private testimony; it reflected the feeling and the 
hope of a whole generation of Christians.) And 
while they prayed and yearned for the Holy City, 
one of their seers was taken to the top of a high 
mountain; and there was shown to him New Jeru- 
salem that great city, coming down from God out 
of heaven. The aspiration was met by an apoca- 
lypse; the prayer was answered with a revelation. 
And this same convergence of search and revelation 
may be descried in all the spiritual discoveries and 
achievements of mankind. 

Observe how the New Jerusalem is described as 
coming down; and congruously with this we speak 
of prayer going up. Our speech, even of these great 
things, cannot get away from the imagery of space. 
But these images of ''coming down" and "going up'* 
are connected in our day with two rather formidable 
words which are applied to God, namely, transcend- 
ence and immanence. Roughly, the former stands 
for the idea of God without and above us ; the latter 
for God in us; and while this seems simple enough 
on the face of it, it implies a logical difficulty which 
is virtually insuperable. With that however we 
need not for the moment concern ourselves. 

Now when we speak of a revelation, or of a be- 
stowal of grace, we have no difficulty in thinking of 



OF GOD ABOVE AND GOD WITHIN 69 

it as "coming down,'* and as coming down from 
God. That is indeed the assumption on which re- 
ligion rests; these are gifts of God that come to us 
from without. But we have in the past been in the 
habit of supposing that the search, the quest and 
the prayer are the independent motions of the hu- 
man spirit, that we are (as it were) "self-starters." 
We are however beginning to recognise that the 
search and the prayer are divine impulses. We are 
fragments of deity; and the hunger-urge of our 
spirits is simply that "that which drew from out the 
boimdless deep" and is lodged within us, turns its 
face steadfastly homeward. It is deep calling unto 
deep; and as the hither deep calls to yonder deep, 
there is an answering signal, — ^an apocalypse, a 
showing, a revelation. 

And so God Transcendent and God Immanent, 
who are strangers in logic, meet in experience. Our 
prayers go up from God ; the answering sign comes 
down from God. 

Ill 

Take for instance the growth of moral ideas. We 
are so made that we are compelled to live together; 
we are (as it has been said) "social animals," and 
we are therefore compelled also to discover how we 
can live together in peace and to good purpose. In 
the very process of living together, we have found 
out that there are certain things we must agree to do 



70 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

and other things we must agree to abstain from 
doing if we are to have a quiet and fruitful life. 
These agreements constitute what we call morality. 

But when men attend to these things seriously 
they discover that some of these agreements are not 
mere expedients in the interests of a quiet life but 
that they have a sanction of another kind. In time, 
they receive an endorsement uttered in the impera- 
tive mood in an accent not our own. They seem 
to be sealed for us by an external authority from 
whose decree there is no appeal and which gives 
them a universal validity. 

This search for the conditions of a peaceable and 
fruitful common life springs from the facts of our 
own natures. We seek them because we have so 
far to be true to ourselves. It is a sort of thrust, 
of urge within us; it is the impulse of Life itself 
and of the Spirit of Life within us, which is the 
Immanent Will of God. The moral advance of the 
race results from the thrust of the divine imma- 
nence; and when men have been sensitive and 
obedient to this thrust, they have soon or late re- 
ceived a revelation of the values of life which has 
given authority and universal validity to the moral 
truth they have discovered in experience. 

This is the meaning of Sinai. We speak of Moses 
as a great legislator; but he did not make the 
Jewish Law. The Jews tliemselves discovered 



OF GOD ABOVE AND GOD WITHIN 71 

it in their experience of life; and Moses did no 
more than record it. (Law generally is merely the 
formal statement of common observances or of what 
is seen by common experience to be necessary. 
And as a matter of fact, only laws that correspond 
fo this description are ever obeyed. That is what 
we mean when we say that you cannot legislate 
ahead of public opinion.) But the Jews discovered 
their law and (though with great difficulty) obeyed 
it. But their obedience to it led them to a moment 
at which the general substance of their law received 
an authoritative endorsement from without in a 
great and dramatic revelation of values. 

The story of Sinai may or may not be historically 
true; but it is true to the experience of life. It 
dramatises some signal revelation by which it became 
known to the Jews that the genius of their Law was 
true to the nature of things. The Decalogue is a 
summary, — a definition of values rather than a set 
of rules for conduct, an unveiling of the spiritual 
inwardness of the Law; and whatever the circum- 
stances were under which it was crystallised in 
the form we know, it was a seal and an endorsement 
to the Jews of their own moral aspiration and out- 
look. The upward moral thrust brought them at last 
to Sinai; the quest was answered by a revelation. 
And it is this same general fact reduced to the 
scale of the personal life that Jesus states in one 



72 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

of the most beautiful of his sayings : Blessed are the 
pure in heart, for they shall see God. And in yet 
another place, — He that willeth to do His will shall 
know of the doctrine, whether it be of God. The 
upward thrust at last finds its mark and its rest. 

IV 

And do we not here come upon the meaning of the 
Incarnation and the Cross? The upward thrust 
of life after long and patient struggle at last brought 
to birth Jesus of Nazareth; for he was the product 
of the forces of Life, as we all are, "very man 
of very man" as the Creed says. Yet you cannot 
wholly explain Him in that way; and that was how 
Athanasius and Arius fell into controversy. They 
agreed well enough as to the position of Jesus; both 
thought and felt alike about Him. Their quarrel 
was about how he reached that position; and vir- 
tually it was this : Athanasius said He came down 
from above; Arius said that He came up from 
below. The terms of that old controversy are no 
longer vital ; and the idiom of our thought enables 
us to say that both Athanasius and Arius were right, 
and to affirm that the Christ came both up from 
below and down from above. 

Observe how his life shows this correspondence 
of human aspiration and divine endorsement. As 
a man, he went down to Jordan to be baptised, ful- 



OF GOD ABOVE AND GOD WITHIN 73 

filling the human part; and in that same hour the 
divine seal was given to his spirit. *This is my 
beloved Son in whom I am well pleased." And as 
he reached, as man, the supreme moment of a perfect 
obedience, a voice uttered itself through him that 
men then acknowledged and have acknowledged ever 
since to be the voice of God, offering to men the 
one fitting gift for their unutterable need. In the 
Cross, immanence and transcendence are one and the 
same thing. For man at his manliest and God at his 
divinest meet in one and the same act. There 
you have Man, the Child of God, in the person of 
Jesus bringing to God the meet offering of a 
child, a willing and loving obedience; and there too 
you have God in the person of Jesus offering to 
man the gift of a perfect and limitless forgiveness. 
There God and Man meet in a perfect unity, at 
once revealing the purpose of God and the destiny 
of man, and in both, the process of the ages. For 
history is no more than the story of a lost child 
in search of its father; and revelation is the tale 
of a father in search of his lost child. On 
Calvary the stream of history and the stream of 
revelation meet. The Cross is the symbol, the 
promise, the first fruits of the final restoration, of 
that City of God in which God shall dwell with his 
people; and "He shall be their God and they shall 
be his people." 



74. WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 



When the Mound of Gezer in Palestine was being 
explored some years ago, they did not uncover the 
mound; they dug a deep trench across it. And 
when men explore this hill of Calvary, the best they 
can do is to dig a trench across; and that is what 
they all do. There are many trenches men may dig ; 
for if the Cross be what it is here said to be, it 
will take many a long day before we dig out all its 
meaning. If the Cross shows us God and Man in 
the whole inmost truth of their being gathered up in 
one complete and consummate act, why then, it holds 
in itself the whole secret of life. I remember the 
late Dr. Fairbairn of Oxford saying that ''Calvary 
is an epitome of the world." It is, and more, — it is 
an epitome of two worlds, the world of God and the 
world of man. It is the whole of life human and 
divine focussed down to one point of light; and 
it will yet need all the devotion, the skill, the 
wisdom and the energy that we are capable of 
before we are nearly through with our task of ex- 
ploring the Cross. What men do is to take some 
idea that reflects a sense of their own personal 
need and then use this idea as a tool to dig a 
trench across Calvary, — and so each man finds 
an aspect of its meaning. St. Paul for instance, is 
concerned with the problem of his own personal ex- 



OF GOD ABOVE AND GOD WITHIN 75 

perience, the problem of moral freedom and recon- 
ciliation to God, the problem that is, of personal 
redemption ; and to him, the Cross yields its meaning 
in those terms. The writer of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews has two ideas which colour his mind, — 
the fulfilment of revelation and the rule of life. 
He is concerned to show how the Cross is the fulfil- 
ment of all the revelation that God had hitherto 
made of Himself, and is also the clue to the phil- 
osophy of human behaviour. His central thought 
is that of Sonship — ^how God spoke in a Son and 
how that Son proved his Sonship by obedience. For 
this writer the Cross is the supreme moment of a 
perfect obedience. And so in every generation 
men have turned to the Cross and have offered their 
own interpretation of it. And it is foolish to suppose 
that this or that interpretation is alone true. What- 
ever the honest seeker has found in the Cross is 
there; and every doctrine of the Atonement which 
has helped men's souls is so far true. It is probably 
true that even now we are still wading in the shal- 
lows; and the Cross has riches yet to reveal to us 
beyond anything we have yet seen. 



VII 
OF GOD AS A SOCIETY 



VII 

OF GOD AS A SOCIETY 



WE have seen that the credal statements about 
Jesus were the result of an attempt to de- 
scribe a new experience in terms of an inherited 
philosophy; and the doctrine of the Trinity was 
evolved as a part of the same process. The doctrine 
of the Trinity is not formally defined in the New 
Testament, though there are in the New Testament 
certain materials which contributed to the formula- 
tion of the doctrine. In any case, our concern is not 
with philosophy of the people who formulated the 
doctrine, but with their experience ; and the question 
for us is this, — Can we discover in our own ex- 
perience the precise content which led these people 
to formulate the Trinitarian dogma? I think we 
can. 

Now we are all aware of a certain contradiction in 
our thought of God. Browning makes Pippa sing, 
you remember, 

"God's in his heaven, all's right with the world;" 
79 



80 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

and when Jesus taught us to pray, he bade us say,. 
"Our Father who art in heaven." But we feel 
that this is not a complete view of God; it is not a 
view that fully expresses our own experience. For 
we have a sense that God is not merely in his heaven 
but here also in his world, "his secret presence run- 
ning through creation's veins,' and here in ourselves 
also; rather brokenly, fitfully, it is true, but certainly 
here in us when we are truest to our own selves. 

But how can God be in his heaven and in his 
world at the same time? How can he have an 
existence objective to us and yet dwell in us? Here 
is at least a logical contradiction. One possible 
answer is that one or other of these propositions can- 
not be true. That is what the Deists said. They 
said that God was in heaven. He had made this 
universe, charged it up with energy, ordained certain 
laws for it, and then sent it off on its long journey. 
He is the super-machinist who has contrived and 
started the engine and then let it go, having presum- 
ably nothing more to do with it than to look at it. 
The Pantheists answered the question in the same 
way, only that they said that God was not in any 
heaven but altogether in His Universe, that He 
was the Universe and the Universe was He. But 
neither Deism nor Pantheism answers the question 
of the heart. For we can let go neither of the 
Father, God above us, nor of the Spirit, God in 



OF GOD AS A SOCIETY 81 

us. To use the modern idiom ; we think that God is 
transcendent and we think that he is at the same 
time immanent. We are aware of the contradiction; 
but we cannot get rid of it by denying either the 
transcendence or the immanence. Though we can- 
not easily reconcile them, we feel that both must 
be true; and the question which we have to ask now 
is, Can we find a third term which will do away 
with this contradiction, and give us a God whom 
we can conceive of as being transcendent and im- 
manent at the same time? 

This dilemma is a very old one, — much older 
than Christianity. The Greeks had long felt the 
pressure of it; the Jews had been aware of it, and 
found relief from it in the Doctrine of Angels and 
the Wisdom Teaching. The Greek solution of it 
was, as I said in a previous discussion, the doc- 
trine of the Logos. The Logos was the emanation 
of God in his universe; the Stoics held that the 
Logos was present in every man, represented by 
the human reason. But if the Logos in man was the 
human reason, then God must be the Infinite and 
Absolute Reason. So far as it went, the solution 
was sound. But you will remember how the heirs 
of this tradition came upon Jesus, and then said 
"Here is the Logos," and leaped to that great 
affirmation, **The Logos became Flesh and dwelt 
among us." Here is the great advance that thought 



«2 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

made. Hitherto it had regarded the Logos as 
Reason; its new discovery was that the Logos was 
a Person. 

Now it would take us far out of our depth to 
try to trace out all that follows from this. But it 
is plain that men would no longer think of God as 
the Ultimate Reason but as a personal Being; they 
would moreover realise that the Universe had a per- 
sonal meaning and a personal purpose. But this 
only became possible because they had found all 
that their intellects had told them to expect in 
God and all that their hearts longed to find in God 
embodied in a human person. They did not cease 
to believe that the Ultimate Reality was rational; 
but they now saw that it was more, — it was personal. 
The hidden God above them, the dim God within 
them was revealed to them in a human person. And 
they gathered up the Transcendent God and the 
Immanent God into one thought by means of the 
Incarnate God in the person of Jesus. The unfilled 
chasm in their minds between God the Father 
and God the Spirit was filled when they saw in Jesus 
all that they looked for in God ; and the old guess that 
God is the Ultimate Reason was lost in the splendid 
certainty that God is Love. The conception of God 
without us, and that of God within us were recon- 
ciled and unified in the thouc:ht of God zvith us. 



OF GOD AS A SOCIETY 83 

And it was of this perception that the doctrine of the 
Trinity was born. 

n 

It has to be admitted that the doctrine of the 
Trinity is an answer to a problem mainly intellec- 
tual. Yet in facing an intellectual problem, the 
fathers discovered a truth which is valid for the 
whole of life. Indeed, the doctrine of the Trinity 
would not be worth holding merely as an opinion; 
and it would not have survived at all if it did not 
mean something for life. What then does it mean ? 

Observe then that these people who formulated 
the doctrine did not say that the Ultimate Reality 
was a person, but that it was personal; or to use 
a distinction made by a modern thinker ; they thought 
not of the personality of God but of personality in 
God. But to say that God is personal is also to 
say that God is social; for personality and society 
are inseparable terms. What makes a living thing 
personal is that it is capable of society, capable that 
is of rational intercourse with other living things 
of the same kind. The doctrine of the Trinity 
means that God is not an individual but (as it were) 
a society. The Unity of God means that He is the 
Perfect Society. This does not mean that He is a 
sort of Coalition Government running the universe; 
but just because the ultimate ground of Society is 



84 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

love, it means that the Ultimate Reality is Perfect 
Love. 

This means something for life. The doctrine of 
Transcendence standing by itself has often made 
God a remote and cold abstraction whom we could 
not get near; and the doctrine of Immanence alone 
would in the end leave us with a God of many 
colours, reflecting the multiplicity and confusion 
of things. But a God who is perfect love in him- 
self is a God whom we can worship and yet who is 
nearer to us than breathing, closer than hands or 
feet. He is a God whom we can trust, for he can 
love us without needing us to perfect his love in 
himself, and who loves us whether we give him our 
love or not. 

But for this very reason he requires that we 
shall love one another, that we shall be among our- 
selves what He is in himself, a unity in love. For 
his nature fixes the law of our life. And here we 
are on rock-bottom. 



VIII 
OF SPIRITUAL FREEDOM 



VIII 

OF SPIRITUAL FREEDOM 

"Say to the bound, Go Forth" 



MAN," said Rosseau, "is born free ; but every- 
where he is in chains." And the heaviest of 
the chains are those which he makes for himself. 
Some indeed he inherits ; and they are very grievous. 
Others he suffers men to put on him; and they too 
are grievous. Yet neither the bonds he inherits nor 
the fetters other men fasten upon him can hold 
him if his spirit be free. "Stone walls do not a prison 
make;" and manacles of steel are powerless to bind 
a free spirit. The spirit of man can be holden of 
nothing but of bonds of its own making. 

But what the spirit of man can make it can also 
break; and in a sense the history of the race is a 
history of making and breaking bonds. Not indeed 
that the human spirit has ever deliberately fashioned 
bonds for itself. It has created organs of security; 
it has evolved techniques for the conduct of life; 
it has formulated doctrines in order to fix and ta 
87 



88 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

perpetuate its own discoveries in its experience of 
life; it builds up institutions to serve the purposes 
of life. But in the course of time, it comes to regard 
these things as possessing a certain sacrosanct and 
final quality and to imprison itself within them. 
Doctrines, institutions, laws^ customs that were 
meant to be channels of life become the prison of 
life, and often its grave. But soon or late the time 
comes when the spirit that is in man breaks through 
the old traditional fences and goes out in search of 
new truth, new ways of life, to create new organs 
for the expression of new ideals and the furtherance 
of larger hopes. The great formative passages in 
human history, those supreme moments the remem- 
brance of which thrills us and warms our blood, are 
the days when the human spirit has shaken itself 
free of ancient good that has become uncouth and 
stale and has leaped into a larger inheritance of light 
and joy; and common men have risen to great and 
awful heights of stature in the splendid struggle. 
Just as in the animal world, life had to forsake the 
security of protective armour, and the crustacean 
had to shed its crust in order to become free-moving 
fish and fowl, so the time comes when the human 
spirit has to fare forth into the unknown, leaving the 
precarious security of ancient doctrines and time- 
worn institutions, the familiarity of well-trodden 
ways, to add new regions to its empire, to find 



OF SPIRITUAL FREEDOM 89 

Space and enlargement adequate to its own possi- 
bilities. In this connection it is well to recall that 
Bergson tells us how in the animal world those 
types have made the greatest successes that have 
taken the greatest risks; and if you wish to translate 
this into the idiom of the human spirit, you may 
say that those men and those societies have achieved 
most who have had the most adventurous faith. 

When the spirit of man has made an advance 
and has gained some ground, it proceeds to "dig it- 
self in," as the soldiers did in the war when they 
took up a new line. They did this in the war in 
order to prevent the possibility of having to fall 
back and lose the ground they had gained. And that 
is why the human spirit digs itself in. It creates 
institutions, it formulates doctrines; it develops 
traditions; and these are the trenches by which 
it hopes to retain the new ground and prevent re- 
gression and retreat. But suppose that in the course 
of the war the idea had grown that the front line 
trenches were to be regarded not as marking a 
stage in the line of advance but as a sort of fron- 
tier, and it became an offence not only to go but even 
to talk of going beyond this frontier, — then you 
would have a position analogous to what happens in 
life. A point comes when men forget that their 
traditions, doctrines, institutions merely mark the 
limit of the last advance and suppose that they rep- 



90 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

resent the last frontier beyond which is nought but 
everlasting No Man's Land holding only destruction 
and darkness and death. And so we say : This Insti- 
tution is sacrosanct; woe to him who touches it, 
criticises it, or tries to change it! This Dogma is 
the last Word of God, woe to the heretic who denies 
it or departs from it! This Tradition is the Law 
and the Prophets, woe's the man who despises it or 
assails it ! And in this man has been as good as his 
word. He has stoned, burned, shot, starved, hanged, 
drawn and quartered the venturesome person who 
questioned his orthodoxies and tried to push out 
beyond the traditional front line. 

But the one thing that the spirit of life cannot 
do is to **stay put." It is its genius to go ahead. 
And soon or late it touches a man or a company 
of brave souls and sends them *'over the top." And 
there you have as simply as possible the secret of 
your Pauls and Luthers, your Puritans and your 
Covenanters ; and it is a just ground of pride and no 
less of splendid obligation that it has so often fallen 
to men of our race, from John Wycliffe and John 
Ball to John Wesley and John Brown, to go over the 
top to lead the charge against the powers of night 
and to bring the race a day's march nearer its 
promised land of Perfect Light and Perfect Liberty. 
They were the chosen organs of the Spirit of Life 
in its agelong Odyssey in search of a perfect home 



OF SPIRITUAL FREEDOM 91 

and a perfect day when it may come at last to full 
and perfect flower. 

n 

But this thrust out of bondage into the freedom of 
the spirit, and its stirring history, is meaningless 
except the drama be re-enacted upon the plane of 
the personal life. The growing point of life is 
the individual spirit; and it is only as we push out 
the frontiers of light in front of our own doors 
that we are true to the genius and spirit of life. And 
I am not sure that the first word of the Gospel to us 
to-day is not precisely this of the prophet's: Say 
to the bound, Go forth. For we have come upon a 
time when it seems as though the formulae and 
the dogmas — whether in religion, or in politics, or 
in economics — that our fathers did business with 
have become obsolete and exhausted; and we are 
facing a new strange world which is proving to be 
too tough a problem for our traditional acceptances. 
The old roads along which we travelled came to a 
tragic and bloody end in the war ; and we are out on 
a seemingly trackless waste in which we have to 
build a highway for our God and roads to the 
City of God. And it is only as we affirm and use a 
true freedom of the spirit that we shall be fit for the 
gigantic task to which God has called this genera- 
tion. 



92 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

The problem of a man's freedom is in his own 
hands; and it is for him to say whether he is to 
be bound or free. Other men may show the way; 
but only he can break his chains. But as a rule 
he fails to see all the chains that bind him. A 
little time ago I heard a friend of mine say : *'I find 
I am more saved in some parts of me than in other 
parts." And it is equally true to say that we are 
all more free in some parts of us than in others. 
I have known men of an expansive charity who were 
yet hidebound in mind; I have known men of great 
intellectual liberality who were in a hopeless moral 
servitude. I have known men who looked upon the 
physical universe with a true scientific breadth but 
whose religious mind was utterly stalled; and I 
have found theological liberals who were political 
bigots. But there is something that the Scriptures 
call the glorious liberty of the sons of God; and I 
imagine that that liberty is the condition a man 
achieves when he turns and says to his bound mind, 
Go forth ; and to his bound heart, Go forth ; and to 
his bound moral sense, Go forth; and to his bound 
will. Go forth. And nothing short of this rounded 
freedom is implied in the Christian redemption. 
The word redemption is borrowed from the slave- 
market; it contains the picture of a slave being 
bought into freedom! and the freedom of which it 



OF SPIRITUAL FREEDOM 93 

speaks is a freedom of the whole man, in every 
part of him. 

I. Say then to the bound mind, Go forth, — forth 
out of the enclosure of a static orthodoxy into the 
region beyond, where God is still revealing and 
fulfilling himself in ways that eye hath not yet 
seen or ear heard. By this please do not suppose 
that we repudiate our inheritance from other days. 
On the contrary, we shall look upon the creeds, 
the traditions, the institutions which the past has 
handed down to us and say: These are the land- 
marks of the road by which the human spirit has 
travelled hitherto; on that same road I stand, and 
go ahead. And by that experience of the past which 
is embodied in these things we shall test our own 
journey. We cannot be true to the future if we are 
false to the past. Tradition is a great and priceless 
treasure; and he is a fool who despises it. Yet 
the true place of tradition is behind us, not in front 
of us. We build upon the past, not with it. The 
genius of the spirit of life spoke in John Robinson 
when he said to the departing Pilgrims : God has still 
more light and truth to break forth from His holy 
word. And this is true not only in religion but 
in every part of life, in its economics, its politics, 
and its art. Time makes ancient good, if not always 
uncouth, yet soon or late always inadequate. 

It was said of a certain English bishop that he 



94 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

had stopped thinking thirty years ago; and there 

are a good many people like him. Some indeed there 

are who have never for themselves thought at alU 

but have taken what was given to them without a 

question, mere dealers in second-hand wares. They 

have dug themselves in, poor immobile spirits whom 

the Spirit of Life sweeps past and who in their 

dismay and bewilderment cry out, Heretic, Radical 

or any other ugly old name that saves the trouble of 

thinking. You cannot keep pace with life without 

a mind ready for adventure. If you choose to stay 

behind the barricades of old belief, singing 

"It was good enough for mother 
And it's good enough for me," 

the trouble with you is a sort of unbelief, a kind 
of atheism, no faith in life, no faith in the God 
of life. The attempt to stereotype thought, every 
form of credalism or dogmatism whether religious 
or scientific, political or economic, all this is an 
offence against life. The one thing you cannot do 
with life is to regimentate it; you cannot cut it down 
to a uniform pattern; you cannot hold it in a strait- 
jacket; and you will need to be up early with a mind 
broad-awake to keep up with it. The man who 
lingers in a cosy corner of ancient orthodoxy is in 
danger of falling among those forms of life which 
have stood still while the spirit of Life has gone 
ahead on its royal way. 



OF SPIRITUAL FREEDOM 95 

2. And say to the bound heart, Go forth. Wil- 
liam Blake used to say that the intellectual leaders 
of his day had fixed 'limits of opakeness," to their 
minds, — intellectual abstractions and formulations 
through which it was impossible to see light. Fool- 
ish and disastrous as that may be in the region of 
the mind, it is even more so when men have fixed 
"limits of opakeness" to their hearts. For there 
is no spiritual impoverishment so deadly as that 
which follows the denial of love, — ^hate, prejudice, 
jealousy, envy, clannishness, any of those tempers 
which separate us from our brethren. Men fence 
themselves round with pride of birth and pride of 
place, deeming those without the pale a mere rabble. 
Others barricade themselves behind pride of race 
or nation or religion, despising "the lesser breeds 
without the law," and so starving their own spirits. 
For life takes its own revenge upon those who are 
grudging of their love. The Samaritans were once 
a considerable and powerful people; when I visited 
their colony at Nablus a few years ago, I saw what 
was left of them — a mere handful of men and wo- 
men, physically degenerate and mentally contempti- 
ble. That is the price of pride, the nemesis of exclu- 
siveness, the fated tragedy of the closed heart. There 
is an old Indian proverb, "There are always people 
on the other side of the hill;" and for the most part, 
we leave them there. Yet there must be room in our 



96 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

hearts for these people on the other side of the hill 
if we are to be true to life. Policies of exclusion, of 
isolation, attitudes of hostility, of contempt, these 
are denials of the Spirit of life; and for men and 
nations, they are a form of slow suicide. Just as 
a stone cast into a pond starts a circling ripple that 
expands until it breaks on the far shore, so our 
love should go out in ever-expanding waves of com- 
prehension and charity. Let us say to these bound 
hearts of our — Go forth ! 

3. But also let us say to the bound moral sense : 
Go forth. "Except your righteousness transcend 
the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye 
cannot enter into the Kingdom of heaven." There 
is perhaps little that so binds men as the habit of 
conventional goodness, a traditional virtue; and 
it was in that bondage that Jesus found the good 
people of his day. They had fallen into moral 
ruts and had come to suppose that there was no 
life or truth or wisdom outside those ruts. 

And it is largely the trouble with us also. We 
have in our turn developed a kind of legalism; and 
goodness to us is very much an affair of rules and 
prescriptions. There are (we say) some things that 
we should do and other things which we should ab- 
stain from doing ; and goodness consists for us large- 
ly in walking the tight rope which marks the line 
of orthodox conduct in the midst of a crooked and 



OF SPIRITUAL FREEDOM 97 

perverse generation. It is essentially a standardised 
affair; and because the standard is ever before us we 
tend to a uniformity of conduct which is as interest- 
ing as a row of pins. It may be admitted that this 
conventional standard of conduct is a vast improve- 
ment in quality, in sanity, and in humanity upon the 
standardised morality of the Pharisees, yet the fact 
remains that our standard is beset by the same 
damning fault as that of the Pharisees, — namely 
that it is a standard. And as I understand the New 
Testament, the one thing that the Christian ideal 
of conduct must not have is a fixed standard. It 
may have a direction but it is not to have a definition. 
It may have a particular line of advance but it has 
no prescribed route to a fixed goal. That is to say, 
the New Testament idea of this thing that we call 
goodness is that it is an inner impulse that will ex- 
press itself in all sorts of original and creative 
ways as the various occasions and contingencies of 
life may require. It is not something that can be 
analysed and set down in a printed book, first, second, 
third, and so forth. It is a living thing that bloweth 
where it listeth, that is forever trying to outdo 
its own best. It is not a set of rules but an inde- 
pendent and self-directing spirit; and it has a wis- 
dom of its own that makes it equal to every emer- 
gency; and a resourcefulness that enables it to do the 
right thing in every crisis that it meets. And we 



98 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

need nothing so much to-day as the emancipation of 
this spirit from the ruts into which we turn it and 
within which we Hmit and narrow and starve it, 
so that the goodness we display to the world may not 
be a poor negative bloodless pietism but a mighty 
red-blooded creative power that goes out with wealth 
of resource, with the joy of abounding life, and 
with invincibility of purpose, to those tasks of crea- 
tion and redemption which will turn the wilder- 
ness of this world into the Garden of God. 
Ill 
Yet, please understand that all this has another 
side. For with all possible manumission of mind and 
heart and moral sense, there must go the utmost con- 
centration of purpose. For it is a narrow way that 
leads to life. These liberations of mind and heart 
and moral sense make for the increase of the con- 
tacts that we make with the Spirit of Life. Every 
new thought, every act of adventurous goodness, 
is a fresh rootlet struck into the soil of life, which 
brings us more life; and every extension of our love 
is a new nerve that adds to the sensitiveness and 
energy of life. Yet in turn all this wealth of 
thought, of affection, of moral energy, must be 
gathered up and focussed upon a single purpose. 
Professor John Dewey says that the end of educa- 
tion is more education; and with no less truth we 
may say that the end of life is the increase of life; 



OF SPIRITUAL FREEDOM 99 

and that the wealth of life is given to us so that 
we may pass it on. But if it is to be passed on, 
we must needs canalise it, narrow it into a channel. 
When a city wants a water supply, it buys a tract 
of land and builds a dam across the valley so that 
the waters of a thousand streams and brooks may be 
gathered together; and then it lays down a conduit 
to bring the water of the hills into the city streets. 
So in each one of us the brooks of thought and the 
streams of love gather together into a reservoir of 
life, to be passed on in the channels of a single 
strong purpose to all men, the man next door, the 
folks across the street and the people on the other 
side of the hill. And by a blessed paradox this 
stream we send forth returns bearing untold and 
priceless argosies of life to ourselves. This is the 
everlasting miracle of life, — spent, it increases yet 
more ; shared, it is doubly possessed ; given away, it 
is restored a thousand fold. 

I have said nothing here of the heaviest and the 
most tragic of human chains, that dark unlit servi- 
tude that we call Sin, that binds our wills, so that 
the good we would do, we do not and the evil that we 
would not, that we do. Yet here as in every other 
region of life, the old prophetic word holds. To 
the will bound by ancient entail of sin and in the toils 
of evil habit, say. Go forth. And it may, by the 
strange mercy of God, go forth here and now, free 
as the day. 



IX 

OF THE BUSINESS OF LIFE 



IX 

OF THE BUSINESS OF LIFE 

THE other day I saw a quotation from a sermon 
preached in London by a clergyman who 
gained great distinction during the War by his work 
as Chaplain, Mr. Studdert Kennedy. After a whim- 
sical reference to the circumstance that men are 
no longer afraid of the terrors of hell, he went 
on to say that he himself could not get up any 
genuine personal apprehension on the matter. "I," 
he said, "am not the least bit afraid of going to 
hell, but I am horribly afraid that a day will come 
when Someone will look me in the eye and say, 
'Well, and what did you make of \itf " And I 
confess to you that as I read this passage and came 
upon this question, put in so homely a way, I had 
to put it to myself, with results not over reassuring. 
And that surely is the question for all of us — what 
are we making of it? What sort of fruit is grow- 
ing on us? And I am sore afraid that most of us 
have no very satisfactory answer to give. Put it 
to yourself ; suppose this Someone that the preacher 
spoke about were to come to you with that question, 
103 



104 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

that Someone into whose eyes you cannot throw 
the dust that sometimes you throw into your own, 
and from whose searchlight there is no hiding- 
place, and He says to you — Well, and what are you 
making of it? What answer would you give? 

I am not going to try to put upon your lips any 
kind of answer at all. What I would like to do is to 
consider what sort of answer the questioner would 
like to hear. What are we here for, anyway? Life, 
says George Meredith, is a little holding lent to do 
a mighty labour. Yes, but upon that holding, what 
crops are we meant to raise, what fruits are we 
expected to grow? What after all are the ends of 
life? 

Back of this is of course a very enormous ques- 
tion, — What is the meaning of life ? What does this 
thing that we call life mean to God who made it? 
I have no answer to give to this question; I do not 
know, and no man knows. But I would venture 
to believe that my life serves God's ultimate ends 
just in proportion as it achieves its own immediate 
ends. I have my own little holding; that I have to 
till the best I know how ; and I believe that the till- 
ing which brings me the greatest satisfaction is the 
tilling that also satisfies the Landlord who alloted 
me the holding. 

So it resolves itself into this intensely personal 
problem, — How can I get the best that life can give 



OF THE BUSINESS OF LIFE 105 

me? I want to realise, to taste every moment of 
living. I want to spend it upon the things that 
will bring me the greatest, most solid, most abiding 
return. Call it egoism, self-regard, what you will, 
but I want to discover the best securities in which 
to invest my life, so that when I am through with 
it, and Someone asks me, ''Well, and what did you 
make of itf'' I shall be able to stand up like a man, 
erect and unashamed, and answer, / have lived. 
And Someone shall answer me, — ''Well done, good 
and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy 
Lord." 

I 

No man, sang James Russell Lowell, 

*'is born into the world 
Whose work is not born with him." 

And we are all ready to nod an assent to the senti- 
ment. But as one looks upon the world one becomes 
aware of some appalling miscarriage. A man's 
work may be born with him; but one is compelled 
to the conclusion that generally he and his job do not 
appear to find each other. The extensive inefficiency, 
the indifference, even the widely diffused unhappi- 
ness and restlessness which seem to be character- 
istic of the life of our time can only be explained by 
assuming a general prevalence of misfits, — round 
pegs in square holes. Now, I do not propose to 



106 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

examine the causes of this confusion. They are 
partly to be found in the enormous speciaHsations 
and the ensuing monotonies of our industrial sys- 
tem; partly in an inane system of education; partly 
and perhaps chiefly and fundamentally in a wrong 
conception of the ends of life, and a perverse valu- 
ation of life itself. 

In one of Carl Sandburg's Chicago Poems, there 
is a description of a fish-crier: 

"I know a Jew fish crier down on Maxwell Street with a 
voice like a north wind blowing over corn stubble in 
January. 

He dangles herring before prospective customers evincing 
a joy identical with that of Pavlowa dancing. 

His face is that of a man terribly glad to be selling fish, 
terribly glad that God made fish, and customers to 
whom he may call his wares from a pushcart." 

In this little poem I find something of a clue to this 
matter. The fish-crier had v^hat we may strictly 
call a vocation. Now, the distinction of a vocation 
is this: a man may chose his occupation, but his 
vocation chooses him. It calls him; it is literally 
his calling, the thing he is called to do. And the test 
of whether a man has found his vocation or his 
vocation has found him is whether he is ''terribly 
glad" to be at it. A man's occupation only occupies 
him; but his vocation possesses him. He gives to 
his occupation just the time, the attention, the 
strength that he must; and the sooner he is through 



OF THE BUSINESS OF LIFE 107 

with it, the better he likes it. But his vocation 
fascinates him, controls him, holds him ; he is "ter- 
ribly glad" to be engaged in it; quits it with reluc- 
tance, returns to it with eagerness. That should 
be enough to tell us whether most of us have oc- 
cupations or vocations to-day. Somehow or other 
this world of to-day falls sadly and disastrously 
short of the joy of living; and if we are ''terribly 
glad" to be alive and to be working, we appear to 
disguise our gladness very successfully. 

Some day we shall please God have evolved a 
world in which every man and his vocation will 
meet; but I fear that it is still a far cry to a world 
in which there will be no miscarriages and misfits. 
I confess moreover that it does not seem to me that 
modern industry with its minute specialisations 
offers to men the sort of jobs into which they can 
fit and in which they can express their whole selves. 
That is why to-day men look for the joy of living 
outside their daily task; why men regard the day's 
work as a sort of inevitable but unwelcome pre- 
liminary to the business of living, as the unpleasant 
prelude to the good time they look to having when 
the closing bell rings. Some reorganisation of our 
industrial system there must soon or late be if men 
are to do gladly the best work of which they are 
capable, and if we are to develop a human society 
which efficiency and contentment have made healthy 



108 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

and wealthy and wise. But meantime here we are; 
and it is our business as it is our right to get out 
of Hfe all that life can give us. How shall we go 
about it? 

II 

It has always seemed to me that the word joy in 
the New Testament has a quite specific meaning. It 
is no synonym for happiness; nor does it express 
a vague condition of emotional exuberance. Con- 
sider these four passages: 

First: ''A woman when she is in travail hath 
sorrow because her hour is come, but when she is 
delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the 
anguish, for the joy that a man is born into the 
world:" that is to say, the joy of Creation. 

Second: ''Rejoice with me for I have found my 
sheep that was lost :" that is, the joy of Redemption. 

Third: 'Tor joy he (the man who had found the 
pearl of great price) goeth and selleth all that he 
hath and buyeth that field :" that is, the joy of Dis- 
covery. 

Fourth : "This," said John Baptist, when he heard 
that Jesus had entered upon the full tide of his 
ministry, "my joy therefore is made full." That 
is, the joy of a service fully rendered, of a task 
perfectly performed. 

Joy is the inward state in which life registers 
a genuine achievement along the line of its own 



OF THE BUSINESS OF LIFE 109 

program. It is the sense of having hit the tar- 
get, of having arrived, or at least of having passed 
a landmark on the road; it is the sense of having 
made good or at least of making good, the con- 
sciousness of self-realisation, the achievement of 
or the prospect of surely achieving personal com- 
pleteness. 

And if the New Testament is to be trusted, there 
are four things that bring this sense to us. 

The first is Creation; and of the joy of creation, 
the noblest and loveliest is the mother's joy in her 
child. But the mother has no monopoly of this 
joy; for it is the same kind of joy that the painter 
has in the canvas, or the poet in the poem into which 
he has poured the precious stuff of his life, in which 
he has reproduced his own soul. Now the essence 
of creation is just this, that one produces or fashions 
or shapes something that has in it the power to 
kindle life in others, that one forms out of one's 
own substance a vehicle of life. But the artist has 
no monopoly here, for this work of creation is the 
prerogative of every living soul. To this man is 
given the gift of deathless song and to another the 
faculty of making dumb marble speak; to another 
the dramatic genius and to still another the power to 
conceive and raise noble buildings, — yes, but these 
are, after all, specialisations of a universal gift. For 
to each one of us is given the grace, if we will re- 



no WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

ceive it and exercise it, to live life-quickening lives, 
to do life-quickening deeds, to say the life-quicken- 
ing word. And if you have life in yourself, your 
life, your word, your deed will be creative, — raising 
the dead spirits round about you, making the deaf to 
hear, the blind to see. And I tell you, who by the 
strange mercy of God have seen it, that there is 
little joy comparable to that of seeing the light of 
life kindling in a young eye. 

The second is Redemption, the task of seeking 
and saving the lost ; and I question whether there is 
any task so charged with romance as this for the 
man who sees it in its true light. A hard task, 
truly, and needing endless patience; but a task un- 
speakably rich in its rewards. And though every 
other avenue of joy be closed against us, this is 
ever open, for round about us are men and women 
who are in a strict and literal sense to be described as 
lost. I think we have over polarised this word 
"lost" by giving it a rigid theological content which 
Jesus never meant it to have. A thing is lost when 
it is not in its proper place and we have to search 
for it. The misplaced coin, the vagrant sheep, the 
wayward son, all things that have been detached 
from their proper setting, that have drifted from 
their moorings, that have wandered from home, — 
these are the lost whom we have to seek and restore. 
It is the splendid task of mending men, of subduing 



OF THE BUSINESS OF LIFE 111 

the anarchic will, of cleansing the defiled soul, of 
reconciling the moral rebel, and of emancipating the 
moral slave. It is essentially a ministry of moral 
healing and restoration. And we know on the best 
authority that there is joy in the presence of the 
angels for one sinner that repenteth ; and shall he who 
went out to rescue that sinner be denied a share in 
the joy of his Lord? I trow not. In its way, and 
on its own plane, this was the joy of Stanley when 
after long and arduous toil he found Livingston 
lost in the long grass of Africa; and to you and me, 
if we have the courage and the patience for the 
adventure is offered the incomparable joys of track- 
ing and finding lost, wandering, stricken souls in the 
wild places of life, in those far countries of estrange- 
ment and sorrow into which men in their wayward- 
ness drift. Something of the joy of the picture- 
restorer too we shall share, as he sees the original 
line and colour of some old masterpieces emerging 
through the grime of centuries; for round about us 
everywhere are fabulous masterpieces obscured by 
the grime of wild living but which may to our 
patient handling yet reveal the authentic outlines 
of an original image of God. 

The third is Discovery: There is little in history 
more thrilling than the romance of discovery : think 
of the great names of those who have surprised some 
secret of the universe, who have stumbled upon 



112 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

some unknown truth, who have searched out the 
mysteries of unexplored lands or uncharted seas, — 
Copernicus and Columbus, Isaac Newton, and James 
Watt, Livingston, Peary, Edison, Bell, Marconi, and 
a great company beside. But we should be much 
mistaken if we supposed that discovery is the pre- 
rogative of genius. The greatest discoveries are 
perhaps after all the privilege of the simple hearted, 
— ''Thou has hidden these things from the wise and 
prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes." And 
there is much more beauty, much more truth to be 
discovered in this world of life than eye hath yet 
seen. The psychologists are teaching us how little 
we know about the hidden world within us ; and we 
have no more than touched the fringe of the deep 
things of God. There is a world of mystery and 
wonder yet uncharted; and there's plenty of room 
for the aspiring explorer. Nor does he need to go 
far from home for his adventure, for most of us 
have yet to discover ourselves. The most important 
thing of all is to remember that the greatest dis- 
covery is not the discovery that others make for us 
but the discovery we make for ourselves. The dis- 
covery that brings me joy is my discovery; it may 
be a little one, but it's mine ; others may have made 
it before me; but it is quite a different thing now 
that I have made it for myself. Yes, but have I, or 
you, made any discoveries of our own? It is our 



OF THE BUSINESS OF LIFE 113 

shame and our poverty that we worship an unknown 
God, ''the God that we took from a printed book;" 
what truth we have is truth that someone told us; 
what beauty we have seen we have seen through 
borrowed eyes ; and our faith is a legacy or an affair 
at second-hand. Shall we not begin to search out 
some things for ourselves — like the man seeking 
goodly pearls? And perchance one fair morning 
you will dig up the pearl of great price, the one pearl 
in all the world for you ; and you'll cry out, Eureka! 
I've found it, — ''Mine eyes have seen the glory of 
the coming of the Lord!" That sort of discovery 
is really waiting, truly waiting for you, if you will 
set out to make it. 

The fourth is, — well, just making good on one's 
job. Only, of course, one must conceive of one's 
job rightly; and broadly it comes to this, that we 
must regard ourselves as servants ; as "men set under 
authority," as men who have been called to iill a 
certain place in the world and who have to render 
an account of it. Do you remember the passage in 
Ruskin's Unto this Last where he says that there 
are in every country four great intellectual profes- 
sions, — the pastor, to teach it; the lawyer, to estab- 
lish justice in it; the soldier, to defend it, and the 
merchant, to provide for it; and he says that it is the 
duty of each of these on due occasion to die for it. 
It shows how far we have wandered from truth and 



114 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

understanding that it should strike us as a Uttle — 
shall I say? — grotesque that the business man as 
business man should die for his country; but what 
Ruskin means is that he should die rather than re- 
sort to deceit, commit injustice, or pass off shoddy 
goods on the community. Thank God, there are 
business men of that kind. There are of course 
pastors who care more for popularity than for people, 
more for rhetoric than for reality; there are doc- 
tors who care more for their pay than for their 
patients; lawyers who care more for their fees 
than for their clients ; and artists who care more for 
a market than for merit. But have you realised 
what a reproach to commerce it is that we should say 
that these men are commercialising their profes- 
sions? Is it true that while we hold that the profes- 
sions should be actuated by a motive of service, we 
think it right that the incentive of commerce should 
be private gain? Commerce is the organisation of 
the processes which provide the community with 
food, clothing, shelter, heat and light. And to feed 
and clothe the community is as noble an enterprise 
as to teach it or to heal it. It is meant to be 
and should be conceived as a great constructive 
social service and not an opportunity for private 
gain. Your business is not your own private gold 
mine : it is your opportunity to serve your generation 
according to the Will of God. And there is joy in 



OF THE BUSINESS OF LIFE 115 

it when through it the sense grows upon you that 
you are filHng a place in the world, that you are 
feeding the processes of life, that you are justifying 
your own existence. To realise your daily task as 
a holy vocation, and so to discharge it, to be making 
good on your own particular job every day, putting 
into it all you know, so that you come to the end 
of each day unstained, undishonoured and un- 
ashamed, and glad even though the day's work 
brought you no more than your daily bread, — that 
is the road to joy, the highway of realisation. And 
then at the end of it all, when Someone says to you 
"And what did you make of it?" you can answer 
with undrooping eyes, — "I was a maker of bread; 
day by day, I baked good bread, and gave good 
measure, so that the hungry were fed ;" or *T was a 
banker; day by day people put their savings in my 
charge; and I have justified their trust," — or what- 
ever it was that you spent your days in doing. The 
supreme joy will not lie in the remembrance of what 
advantage it brought to you but that without fear or 
dissimulation you will be able to answer that Some- 
one in words that he will remember — *T have glori- 
fied Thy Name; I have finished the work that thou 
gavest me to do." And if there or here you remem- 
ber how you fell down and failed, as we all do, 
why then, he counts as fully done that which you 
truly meant and tried to do. Did you try to keep 



116 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

the faith? Well then, you did keep it. Well done, 
good and faithful servant. 

Here then are sources of the joy of living open to 
us to-day, creation, redemption, discovery and ser- 
vice: Let us explore and appropriate them. Life 
is after all short and time is fleet on the wing; and 
we cannot aiford to spend time in dreaming of far- 
off joys that we can never possess. Even in a 
crooked, perverse and badly organised world, you 
and I, if we have the will to seek and to deserve 
it, can find the joy of living in a cup that overflows. 



X 

OF "LOVE AMONG THE RUINS" 



X 

OF "LOVE AMONG THE RUINS" 



NOW and again I take down from its shelf my 
copy of Boutard's Life of Lamennais in order 
to read — for aid and comfort — the story of Monta- 
lembert and the free school. The politicians of the 
Restored Monarchy were not going to stand any 
ultramontane nonsense in the schools; and so they 
took over the keys. Whereupon Lamennais, Lacor- 
daire, Montalembert and some others of their way of 
thinking opened a school of their own. They knew 
they were asking for trouble and they got it. When 
Montalembert, having affirmed his right to be tried 
before his peers, appeared before them and they 
asked the young man his name, he answered, 
**Charles de Montalembert, school master and Peer 
of France." I find in the story something deeply 
moving. But this picture by some odd trick of as- 
sociation calls up another, also Parisian : Van Gogh, 
— the genius who founded the Post-impressionist 
School of painting, whose gospel was Blake's, that 
you see through your eyes and not with them, — Van 
119 



120 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

Gogh going out street-preaching. Whether Van 
Gogh gathered a crowd, whether the crowd under- 
stood what he had to say, — this I do not know ; but 
I do know that the picture stirs me greatly. Perhaps 
Van Gogh had done better to have put a few coloured 
crayons in his pocket and have drawn a picture or 
two on the paving-stones; but that again I do not 
know. But I do know that Van Gogh street-preach- 
ing made a splendid spectacle. 

I have done a good deal of street-preaching in 
my day,— enough indeed to incapacitate myself 
from doing so any more. That I conceive to be a 
grave disability. And I fear that long habituation 
to another — shall I say? — ^more respectable milieu 
has robbed me of whatever faculty I may once have 
had of stating myself to the man in the street. This 
may indeed be no great loss to the man in the street ; 
but I am quite sure that it is an immeasurable 
loss to me. For it is the loss of a discipline in sim- 
plicity and forthrightness which a preacher cannot 
lightly forego. But — apart from any personal ques- 
tion — it is also a vast loss to the man in the street 
and so to all of us. For these are democratic days ; 
the man in the street is the man on the throne; he 
sets the pace at which we all travel ; social progress 
depends upon the rate at which he moves. And what 
is the good of the thinker, the artist, the preacher, 
the teacher, if we cannot make ourselves intelligible 



OF "LOVE AMONG THE RUINS" 121 

to the man in the street, — this person who is master 
of us all? We might as well shut up shop and go 
home if we cannot state whatever gospel we have to 
John Smith, bricklayer, in a way that John Smith 
can understand. 

I am fond of recalling how once I read in a Bible 
Society report that the Gospel of Mark had been 
translated into the Chinook jargon. I had not the 
faintest idea what the Chinook jargon was; but it 
pleased me greatly to think of the Gospel of Mark 
being translated into a "jargon." It should read well 
in a ''jargon," for — if Adolf Deissman be right, — 
it was first written in a jargon, in the common 
speech of the mean streets and quaysides of Alexan- 
dria and Antioch. It is on record that "not many 
wise, not many noble, not many mighty" were 
touched by that strange old propaganda ; but the riff- 
raff of slaves and artisans who heard proved a great 
embarrassment to the Roman Empire until Constan- 
tine managed to fool them into believing that the 
world could be saved more quickly from the top than 
the bottom. And then they lost their trail. Yet it 
still remains true that the world must be saved from 
the bottom ; and one's gospel will not carry far unless 
it can be rendered into a "jargon," at least, into the 
speech of common folk. And that is not so easy as 
it sounds; it is a fine art to be simple and truthful 
and intelligible on a street corner, and it is easy to 



122 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

slip into cheapness and vulgarity. All the same the 
real test of a religion or a doctrine of any kind is 
whether it can be preached from a soap-box. 

Now please do not suppose that I am advocating 
that we should all at once get our soap-boxes and 
start out. Indeed very much on the contrary, I very 
strongly affirm that it will be time enough to do so 
when we find that we have to, and cannot stay at 
home. It is useless to go until we must; and that 
for a very simple reason. Until we find the impulse 
irresistible, I do not think that we shall be intelligible. 
It is not sure that we shall be intelligible even then, 
but it is quite sure that we shall not be until then. 
For intelligibility is not merely a matter of clear 
thinking and precise statement; it is even more the 
child and product of Love. 

In a recent story by an American writer — *Toor 
White" by Sherwood Anderson, — a poor fellow, the 
village idiot whose sole faculty lay in a certain 
deftness in whittling wood, was employed by an in- 
ventor who was making a model of a machine. And 
the writer says, * 'Intelligence began to come into 
the eyes of the man who all his life had whittled 
meaningless wooden chains, baskets formed out of 
peach-stones, and ships intended to float in bottles. 
Love and understanding began a little to do for him 
what words could not have done. One day when a 
part Hugh had fashioned would not work, the half- 



OF "LOVE AMONG THE RUINS" 123 

wit himself made the model of a part that worked 
perfectly." Which thing is a parable, everlastingly 
true. 

**If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels 
and have not love, I am become sounding brass or 
a clanging cymbal," — merely something that makes 
a noise. Something ought to be done about this 
word Love. Perhaps we need a Society for the Re- 
habilitation of Prostituted Words; and the first 
word that should be taken in hand is love. Think 
of all it has suffered at the hands of sentimentalists 
and pornographers. Yet what other word is there 
for the thing it is? **The greatest thing in the 
world," so Henry Drummond said, and fell some- 
what to sentimentalising about it. But he rated it 
too low. Love is not the greatest thing in the world ; 
it is the only world there is ; and the rest is illusion 
and delirium and lies. 

II 

Plainly I have here the materials of a great utter- 
ance ; but somebody else will have to make it. For I 
confess that I have neither the faculty nor the in- 
sight to crystallise the thing I see and feel into a 
quickening prophetic word. This thing we call love, 
the matrix of life, its Alpha and its Omega, its root 
and its fruit, who will dramatise it for us into a 
redeeming vision for which men will live and die? 



124 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

For this address, I gave the title "love among the 
ruins'^ — for what I wanted to say was that love 
is the only physician for a disintegrated world, the 
only architect of its rebuilding, the only captain of 
its rescue. But this is trite and commonplace; you 
have heard it again and again. But I would to God, 
that by his grace, I had the word to say that would 
ignite the thing itself in your hearts, a flame of fire 
that would start the contagion of it ; a vast sweeping 
tide of it that would cleanse the world of all the hal- 
lucinations and follies that sunder us from one an- 
other, and let men be their own human selves, so that 
their spirits may swing to their natural and ap- 
pointed pole of friendship and unity. 

For instead of that, to-day, we are a world of 
conceited and opinionated egoists. We hive off into 
parties and groups and cliques. The ''high brows" 
go off by themselves, and amuse themselves by strik- 
ing sparks off each other, develop a highly wrought 
and peculiar idiom of their own, and end up by spin- 
ning airy and unintelligible aphorisms about next to 
nothing at all, clean out of touch with the realities 
of life; and from their Olympus ape Horace in hat- 
ing the common crowd. And the artists think that 
there is no world outside of the studios and they de- 
velop idiosyncrasies of technique which would make 
them wholly unintelligible to the rest of us. There 
is a good deal of painting and drawing just now 



OF "LOVE AMONG THE RUINS" 125 

that may be saying a good deal; but I confess 
I cannot make head or tail of it. Let the artist 
declare his vision as he sees it, but as the Lord 
liveth, let him do so in a way we others can under- 
stand and not hide it behind a cryptogram legible 
only to the initiated. We others may be ignorant 
and uncouth and contemptible. But we are It all the 
same; we are Life Reality. And Art cannot live 
cut off from us. For the roots of Art are in 
Life; and its own life depends on free give-and-take 
with the rest of Life. A picture that leaves us dead 
and cold as it found us is a spiritual dead-end, and 
love's labour lost. That is, if it is love's labour. 
For I deeply suspect that the trouble with much 
modern Art is that there is little love in it. The 
artists are apt to love an abstraction called Art, 
which means that in the end they love themselves 
best of all. For no man can love abstractions. Love 
is for folks, living things, places where folk dwell. 
But please do not think I want Art for the People, 
That is so much patronising humbug. I only plead 
that art shall be true to life; and it will be true only 
and as it is conceived and born in love. And then it 
will be intelligible as well as true. 

Ill 

Now these gulfs between the Highbrow and the 
Lowbrow, between the Artist and the Artisan are 



126 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

deep enough for all sorts of tragedy. But there are 
others that yawn still more desperately, — gashes on 
the face of life, deep dark Gehennas of prejudice and 
hate and ignorance. There is Capital and Labour, 
Fifth Avenue and the East Side, Catholic and Pro- 
testant, White and Black, Democrat and Republican, 
— and all reaching out for each others' throats. And 
there are innumerable nationalisms and other par- 
ticularisms that complete the chaos . . . Oh, but 
what a mad world it is ! 

And this is the everlasting heartbreak of Christ. 
He had his dream of the "one fold, one Shepherd;'* 
and still the sheep are distressed and scattered 
abroad, shepherdless. And all because we allow life 
to be ordered on the basis of aims and claims which 
because they are self -regarding are always poten- 
tially and for the most part actually in conflict ; and 
we have not yet learned that all genuine human 
interests are identical everywhere all the time. We 
suppose that the prosperity of one group depends on 
injuring the prosperity of another group, and we 
build up tariff walls that in the end hurt and starve 
ourselves. And Jesus came down into the world to 
break down all party-walls, "the middle wall of parti- 
tion" between the Jew and the Gentile first. But we 
have kept standing all the walls we could, but- 
tressing them and repairing them, and we have 
built a thousand thousand walls where there were 



OF "LOVE AMONG THE RUINS" 127 

no walls before. I think that there has been joy 
in the presence of the angels of heaven these last few 
weeks, — for the first time for many a long day, — 
and that because men have begun to speak of dis- 
armament. For what we are going to gain by dis- 
armament is something infinitely more precious 
than governmental economy, though God knows that 
we need that too. William James in one of his 
books alludes to the theory that we do not run away 
because we are afraid but that we are afraid because 
we run away. There is no doubt that fear feeds 
upon its own manifestations. And armaments are 
the children of fear and become the parents of more 
fear, — so much so that a point comes that we can 
never get enough of them; and every additional 
piece of armament makes us more jumpy and nerv- 
ous and widens the gulf between us and our neigh- 
bours. A dreadnought is simply a sign which we 
put up to show how afraid we are of the people on 
the other side of the water; and they take it as a 
sign not of fear but of some hidden hostile purpose. 
So being afraid, they must have a dreadnought too. 
The rift is formed and grows; and every bit of 
history that we have to the point tells us that the 
end of the process is war. Disarmament will mean 
less fear in the world, and that means more elbow- 
room for love. And that is why I think that the 
proposal for disarmament sounded like good news 



128 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

in heaven. It was as the noise of some old party 
walls beginning to fall. 

IV 

And you and I, — what are we going to do about 
it? Not specially about disarmament but about the 
whole philosophy of life that lies behind it. The 
one fundamental controversy of all time is whether 
the superman is the Finished Egoist or the Per- 
fect Lover, whether Corsica or the Cross represents 
the reality of life. The trouble with most of us 
is that we want to have it both ways, to sit on the 
two stools, with the result that we miss both, and 
life becomes a drab and flat and pointless energy, 
achieving nothing. For there is no concord be- 
tween Christ and Belial. Yet we are for ever try- 
ing to compromise between Yea and Nay, to face 
North by South, so that life cancels out, ''leaving 
you vacuity." 

The other day, I came across this saying of an 
Oriental sage — "My friend, you and I shall remain 
strangers to life and to one another and each to 
himself until the day when you shall speak and I 
shall listen deeming your voice my own and when I 
stand before you and think myself standing before 
a mirror." That, I think, is love made perfect; 
and it sounds a long way off. But that is because we 
have not given love a chance. We have cultivated 



OF "LOVE AMONG THE RUINS" 129 

everything but love — our pride, our greed, our lusts, 
our passions ; and we have left love to shift for itself. 
It is the witness of its strength that it has survived 
so great neglect and starvation. We shall one day 
realise that we have been like swine who preferred 
husks to the pearls which were cast before them. 
What fools we have been, who have gone out greed- 
ily after money where all the time we might have 
been piling up riches of love! We have fed our 
pride and filled our pockets while our hearts were 
starving and shrinking. We are dullards who have 
never learnt that a friend is greater riches than a 
fortune, and that it is better to lose the whole world 
than to forfeit a single moment of perfect love. 

Now, you will say, that is sentimentalising. Par- 
don me, this is stark naked realism. I am speaking 
of the realisation of life. We have been living in 
a world turned upside down and have been fooled 
into supposing that money is reality, that empire 
is reality, the prizes of this world, things that we 
can weigh and count. But that is mere superstition 
and we would not believe it, no, not for a moment, 
if we were not standing on our heads. This modern 
gospel of Prosperity is the greatest swindle ever 
perpetrated upon mankind; for it has sent us out 
cultivating the secondary things; and the first and 
the best things of life are left to starve and die. . . . 

And love wants cultivating. There is many a man 



130 WHAT'S BEST WORTH SAYING 

and his wife who have come to a point of just toler- 
ating one another; some indeed are so bored with 
each other that there is nothing for it but to part. 
The flame of love has spent itself, for it was not 
tended; and that flame needs more tending than 
any other. I look back upon my life and recall 
friendships that I have allowed to lapse, — unan- 
swered letters, how well we all know the story ! No, 
love needs tending, all the time; and those starved 
and straggling shoots of a wider love that are in 
our souls, how little chance they have of coming to 
anything in the senseless rush and fever of our 
life. You and I will begin to taste the magnificence 
of life when we can simply and unaffectedly say for 
ourselves, be it ever so haltingly, the word of the 
Perfect Lover. * 'Inasmuch as ye have done it unto 
one of the least of these, ye have done it unto me." 
For that is love. It is a mystic fire which fuses 
me and my neighbour into one, a secret magnetism 
which draws men's souls into harmony and oneness 
of life, an alchemy that transfigures a mob into a 
single family. And it is the world in which we 
find ourselves. Please do not think that love is that 
curious thing men call Altruism; for that is the 
counterfeit of love. Love is also a hunger and it is 
therefore humble. But Altruism is a sort of conde- 
scension, — a coming down from the pedestal of our 
own sufficiency to those poor dear unfortunate 



OF "LOVE AMONG THE RUINS" 131 

things in the slums. The curse of most philanthropy 
is that it is tainted with patronage ; there is too much 
charity that is muddied by contempt. Uplift — I 
am sick of hearing about it. Uplift, indeed, and to 
what level ? Our own of course. But what do you 
and I know about life, about its high places? I 
am tired of our middle class presumption. "And if 
I bestow all my goods to feed the poor and if I give 
my body to be burned but have not love, it profiteth 
me nothing, — " it is simply no good; and there is no 
more to be said about it. 



THE END 



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